Orage is an open source and freely downloadable graphical software project that has been especially designed for the lightweight Xfce desktop environment, to act as a minimal calendar utility.

The application is engineered in such a way that it can use the iCal interface, instead of old dbh one, for storing and utilizing calendar appointments. It lets users to add reminders, events, and many other calendaring tasks used by a normal user.

As mentioned, Orage is designed for and distributed along with the Xfce desktop environment, which means that it will be automatically installed when attempting to create a default Xfce setup on top of your GNU/Linux operating system.

Of course, you can also install Orage using the source package, deploying it on other open source desktop environments/window managers, such as Cinnamon, MATE, LXDE, Openbox, etc..

It installs like any other open source Linux program, by downloading the source archive, extracting its contents, and running the ‘./configure && make’ and ‘sudo make install’ commands.

When using Orage for the first time, you’ll have to add your local timezone in the preferences, otherwise you won’t be able to use timezones in any appointments, which will lead to numerous problems.

The program sits in the system tray area of your desktop environment, which means that will always run in the background, even after you’ve closed the main window. To interact with it, simply click the tray icon.

Right clicking on the tray icon will give you quick access to application’s preferences, but you can also add a new appointment or access the Orage Globaltime application, if it is installed. The software is compatible with all Linux kernel-based operating systems, 32-bit and 64-bit ones.