I seem to be realising that my copy of Rainlendar (Lite, 2.6, on Fedora 11) doesn't do auto-refresh, in the sense that even if the calendar file is changed it doesn't reflect that change unless you manually 'refresh' it.

My local calendar file changes often, as it is synchronised with Google, so I want it to refresh itself periodically.

Now I resort to a rather inelegant measure, whereby a cron process simply stops and re-launch the program... Clearly it'd be better to have some native solution, or at least, to just refresh it with cron with a command from the console.

If anybody could suggest a better way that'd be very much appreciated.

Have you enabled the "Monitor changes" from the calendar's settings? If you have and it still doesn't work you can refresh the calendar like this:

rainlendar2 -e "Hotkey_Refresh()"