Alarm program - preferably Gnome

[Chris G]

Having decided that there's no application out there that can manage
both my calendar/time management *and* my reminder/alarm requirements
I've decided to look for a dedicated alarm program.  My requirements
are:-

    Must run in the background or be driven by cron so that alarms
    will appear regardless of what I'm doing (I will be running an X
    desktop but that's the only guaranteed thing, actually not quite,
    Firefox is always running too).

    When an event is due I want to be able to pop up daily reminders
    from a specified number of days before the event and to be able to
    stop them when I have 'done' what is required.  I'd like the
    pop-up (flag, whatever) to be permanent until I acknowledge it,
    something like an icon in the Gnome Panel would be OK.

    Events need to be specified by date, time of day is unlikely to be
    significant.  For most things a yearly repeat would be fine (e.g.
    a 'birthday' type reminder), I also have several which are
    quaterly but I'm prepared to deal with them by setting up four
    annual reminders if necessary.


Kalarm seems to fulfil most of my criteria - any other ideas?  Is
there something more 'Gnome friendly' or generic maybe?   

A PIM or groupware application which can do this might be of interest 
but I will *not* be running it all the time so note the first
criterion above.

-- 
Chris Green