If all you need is a flexible and powerful event reminder then KAlarm
is pretty good - it's in the repositories but as it's a KDE program
you also get a lot of other KDE related files. Not a problem, it's
just that you might be alarmed at all the other stuff it will ask to
install along with KAlarm

I'll check out KAlarm and GnoTime..............

There are several in the repos. I tried GnoTime but there was one i
tried few months back that did a Gantt chart type analysis - if i can
remember which one i'll post back.