Some trials and tribulations. Bought a NooElec RTL-SDR off Amazon, and configured an old Powerbook G4 with Ubuntu 12.04 to run it. Installed gnuradio, rtl-sdr, etc from source (miraculously) without issues. Was able to build some simple radio/fft devices with gnuradio-companion but everytime I tried to demodulate a signal I received volk memory errors. Rtl_test shows the dongle is working, but rtl_fm wouldn't demodulate wbfm signals to anything intelligible (static was all i could make out!).
At this point I was fearing I had a deaf RTL-SDR, and decided to at least try it on a different hardware/software combo to be sure. Installed Gqrx on an intel Mac running 10.7...and BINGO. It was pulling in WBFM (and NFM) just fine.
So...some ups and downs. Haven't tried using the dongle with Gnuradio on the intel mac yet but that's in the near future. Not sure what to do about my Ubuntu PPC system yet....I might try downloading individual components and recompiling.