Evolution does not notify on missed alarms

Thank you for your bug. That's known upstream, you can read about it on http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=399177

I think the importance of this bug should be at least "medium", because this feature is critical for who relies on calendar alerts all day, and this bug is really annoying...
However, I have discovered (at least on Ubuntu Gutsy - Gnome 2.20.1), where the problem is, I think.
This problem happens when a Gnome session is saved at least one time, more precisely when session is saved manually or automatically: It seems that
"evolution-alarm-notify" daemon has some problem with Gnome session management, and it won't "reconnect" properly to calendar events on reboot when it
is recovered by session manager, causing the daemon to lost ALL the events created BEFORE last session end. For me this behaviour is critical!!
But, as a workaround, it's simple to resolve doing this simple steps:

1) Open System->Administration->System monitor and terminate these 3 processes:
       evolution-alarm-notify
       evolution-data-server-1.12 (this is not present all time)
       evolution-exchange-storage
2) Open System->Preferences->Sessions, go to "Session options" tab and manually save the current session clicking the big button
3) Go to the "Start programs" tab (the FIRST tab, my ubuntu system is in Italian so I don't know how this tab is called on English systems...), select
    "Evolution Alarm Notifier" voice and click "Modify" button on the right: in the "Command" line that will appear, add the option
        --sm-disable
    to the command line: on Ubuntu Gustsy, consequentially, this will be:
        /usr/lib/evolution/2.12/evolution-alarm-notify --sm-disable
4) Click Ok, close all and logout or reboot the system: from now on Evolution Notifier will work like a charm.

I hope this strange behaviour will be fixed soon, however disabling session management for evolution-alarm-notify daemon fixes the problem perfectly.

Cheers.

N.B: Maybe this have to be signaled to Evolution mantainers.

Just one note: obiously those 3 processes will be restarted automatically by "Evolution Alarm Notifier" command (/usr/lib/evolution/2.12/evolution-alarm-notify --sm-disable) on startup .

Works on Karmic netbbook release,

but again not in Lucid beta 1

I don't know if you call this a bug, but for me it is. And it has been there for a very long time- at least since Feisty 7.04, and seems to be important to a lot of people. I switched to Mozilla Sunbird because of it, but now Sunbird is not available for Lucid. If I miss an appointment because I was not on my system for a few days, I like to be notified so I can apologize and reschedule. If it seems to matter to a number of people, why is it so hard to fix?

Lucid
I don't have evolution-exchange -data in SysMon, so I guess I can't try the work around.

2 days later, I DO have evolution-exchange -data in SysMon. If the workaround does not work in Lucid Beta 1, does anyone know if it works in Lucid final release?

For what it's worth I tried this workaround with Lucid final release and it doesn't work. Interestingly both I and a friend upgraded to Lucid via update manager and his old notifications pop up no problem next time he reboots. I think I've probably got a slightly bad install.

Will check a few settings this weekend and post back here if I find anything amiss.

From initial setup of evo I had 2 local calendars: "Personal" and "Meeting". While reminders for appointments from "Personal" worked, for "Meetings" ones didn't fired up any notifications. So, after sleepless night of experiments finally I created new local calendar and reminders for it's appointments worked. It was an enlightenment. I renamed that new calendar to "Meeting" and it continued to fire up remainders! So, creating a new calendar may be a workaround.

Does nut solve it here.

I created a completely new calendar as a "local calendar", made an entry to be reminded by alarm, shut down the machine and booted some hours later.

NO alarm message, nor any notification in the panel.

Seems nobody really is interested in fixing this bug in the "ancient heritage from Novell" for whatever reason. However fact is, that this way Lucid is left without a working calendar applichatin as Sunbird was removed from the repositiories.

 I gave up checking settings as I am no programmer and there was too much code to compare with my friend whose notifications work OK.

I tried Pentagon's solution and got the same result as ingo.

Alarms worked fine for me in Jaunty and Karmic and stopped upon installation (via update manager) of Lucid.

The problem continues as an irritation but would stop me from using it in a business. I still think that some of us are having slightly bad installs as not many people are complaining.

You can get Sunbird from Mozilla website (although not supported by Ubuntu) but it has a bug with recurring appointments (which I have). It doesn't integrate with Gnome desktop so you have to run it all the time to get the reminders - might as well stick with Evolution and check the appointments in the drop down calendar on the desktop.

On 06.07.2010 23:41, Noo 2 Ubuntoo wrote:

> The problem continues as an irritation but would stop me from using it
> in a business. I still think that some of us are having slightly bad
> installs as not many people are complaining.

I tried clean install on an ext3 formatted separat partition.

> You can get Sunbird from Mozilla website (although not supported by
> Ubuntu) but it has a bug with recurring appointments (which I have). It
> doesn't integrate with Gnome desktop so you have to run it all the time
> to get the reminders

Get Sunbird from Mozilla and install 'alltray' from Ubuntu-repo, create
a starter with command 'alltray /..../sunbird' and it will start as a
panal applet.

Unfortunately 64-bit Sunbird is only available in en-US, maybe other
NLS-versions are built in future?

For the time beeing I'll stay with Hardy as I am not willing to spend
more useless time in finding workarounds or reporting bugs for Lucid,
which are just collected and never cared for.

This is still a problem in Maverick. Since it SERIOUSLY degrades the reliability of the Evolution calendar/notification system - a central component of productivity for most people - I propose the seriousness be upgraded. Anyone using a laptop is affected by this (computer not left on permanently).

And even worse:

the only alternative Sunbird has been removed from the repositories.
I am running Sunbird 0.9 from Karmic under Lucid!

change status to Fix Released (see gnome-bugs)