Ubuntu: Enabling notifications for KOrganizer and Kalendar events on KDE Plasma
As of this writing, notifications and popups in KOrganizer and Kalendar in KDE Plasma on Kubuntu and Ubuntu are broken and do not work with a standard installation. This brief article explains how to get notifications working.
At my workplace, I schedule a lot of one-on-one meetings with co-workers, and the start times for these meetings vary week-to-week for each meeting. I therefore need a robust calendar, and just as important, a robust reminder system that I can rely on so I don’t miss any meetings. Two calendar programs for KDE Plasma, KOrganizer and Kalendar, both of which can easily be installed with APT from the Ubuntu repository, are great options. They allow local calendars, or you can connect them to a CalDAV server.
Trouble is, when I would schedule an appointment with a reminder, no reminder would show up. I would get … nothing. I double checked the settings within these two programs and double checked the KDE System Settings, but no matter what, I couldn’t get it working. Notifications appeared to be completely broken, full stop. Obviously this would not work for me.
After doing a bunch of searching, I ran into this thread on the KDE forums that gave the right solution.
The module responsible for delivering KDE PIM calendar notifications is apparently “Kalendarac” and in order to run, the “libkf5akonadicalendar-bin” needs to be installed.
thebluequasar, KDE Forums
The trouble is a missing package that does not install as a dependency for KOrganizer or Kalendar. That package is libkf5akonadicalendar-bin, and it can easily be installed on Ubuntu or Kubuntu with the following command:
sudo apt install libkf5akonadicalendar-bin
There’s one caveat: If you plan to use KOrganizer only, which I find to be clunkier and not as good looking as Kalendar, but far more functional and full-featured, the notifications still won’t show up unless you also install Kalendar on your system in addition to libkf5akonadicalendar-bin. I don’t use Kalendar, but I keep it installed sort of as a dependency.
This should get your notifications rolling.
UPDATE February 2024:
This seems to be fixed in newer versions of Linux and notifications just work now, at least in Debian and Ubuntu. If you reinstall your OS for some reason, you may not need to worry about this again.