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Last week I have tested the RTL2832U-based ezcap EzTV666 DVB-T dongle on the air using various VHF signal.

Just a quick note that Gqrx now uses pulseaudio for all audio I/O, which includes I/Q input from the Funcube Dongle.

I am happy to inform all users of the Funcube Dongle and GNU Radio, that the gr-fcd driver is now included in the GNU Radio source tree. You can read the announcement here.

This change will be available in the next GNU Radio release, which I think will be 3.5.3, however, if you pull the code from the GNU Radio git repository the changes are already in your tree. Before you upgrade please remove any earlier installations of gr-fcd to avoid conflicting versions of the library.

My repository on Github will no longer be maintained and any future development of gr-fcd will be done within the scope of the GNU Radio project. I hope this will ensure better integration, more maintainers, more testing and easier installation process.

Thanks to Jan Simon, DL2ZXA, we now have daily builds of Gpredict for Ubuntu 10.04 - 12.04, both 32 and 64 bit. Jan's recipe fetches the code imported from SourceForge, merges it with the translations done in the Launchpad, then builds the packages and puts them in the Gpredict teams Daily builds PPA. You can use this PPA as you would use any other PPA; if you don't know how check out the instructions on the PPA page. Obviously, this is only recommended for testing and not for production use.

I will remember 2011 as the year when the Linux desktop took a huge step backwards. After decades of evolution we finally had a nice Gnome 2 based desktop providing a clean and efficient environment where one could focus on getting the work done. Even the Ubuntu variant with their this-makes-me-wanna-puke-brown and purple theme was okay, because it took only a few mouse clicks to switch back to something more pleasant looking, e.g. the Clearlooks theme. All this is gone now as the majority of Linux desktops come with either Gnome 3 or Unity – two equally useless and pathetic attempts at making the Linux desktop look like a cellphone.