📻 GNOME Radio 80.0

Free Internet Radio Software for GNOME

News

  • July 19, 2026: GNOME Radio 80.0 released.

Overview

GNOME Radio is a free internet radio application for GNOME featuring international radio stations, audio visualization and interactive maps.

Radio at War, Computers on the Wire

How one technology carried a war on invisible waves, and how another built the network that now carries almost everything.

Transmission

Radio in World War II

1939–1945

Military coordination

  • Enabled real-time communication between command centers, ships, aircraft, and ground troops — replacing slow telegraph lines and dispatch riders
  • Allowed coordinated operations across vast distances: naval fleets, bomber squadrons, and armored divisions could act in concert
  • Encryption and codebreaking became central to the war, most famously the effort to break Germany's Enigma at Bletchley Park

Propaganda & morale

  • Governments broadcast to rally citizens — Churchill's speeches, Roosevelt's fireside chats, Nazi state radio
  • Enabled psychological warfare: misleading or demoralizing broadcasts aimed at enemy troops (e.g. "Tokyo Rose," "Axis Sally")

Public information

  • Civilians received near-immediate news of battles, victories, and defeats — shaping public opinion faster than newspapers ever could

Intelligence

  • Radio direction-finding let both sides locate enemy transmitters, submarines, and troop movements
  • Made radio both a vital tool and a source of vulnerability — every signal sent could be intercepted
VOICE ACROSS DISTANCE
SAME PRINCIPLE, NEW MEDIUM
DATA ACROSS THE GLOBE
Network

Computers & the World Wide Web

1989–present

Enabling existence

  • The Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989–91, required computers to host, serve, and render content — without networked computers, there is no Web
  • Affordable personal computers in the 1980s–90s created the user base that made the Web commercially and socially significant

Processing & storage power

  • Rising processing power took the Web from static text pages to rich multimedia — images, video, interactive apps, streaming
  • Growing storage enabled data-driven services: search engines, cloud storage, social platforms

Software & browsers

  • Browsers — Mosaic, Netscape, Chrome and others — are computer programs that translate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into pages people interact with
  • Server-side computing powers dynamic content, databases, e-commerce, and banking

Network effects

  • Interconnected computers built data centers, CDNs, and cloud infrastructure supporting billions of simultaneous users
  • Mobile computing extended the Web beyond the desktop, changing how and how often people access it

Screenshot

GNOME Radio is a free internet radio application for GNOME featuring international radio stations, audio visualization and interactive maps.

Installation

Fedora

sudo dnf install gnome-radio

Source Code

git clone https://github.com/aamotsoftware/radio.git
cd radio
./configure
make
sudo make install
gnome-radio

Help

See the GNOME Radio documentation and user guide for additional help.

World Wide Web Visualizer

See GNOME Radio Studio for World Wide Web Visualizer.

Audio Maps

See GNOME Radio Audio Maps for Free Audio Maps.