There are a lot of conflicting and confusing opinions about the drivers
for this USB NIC, so I eventually chose the rt2570 kernel module from
the Rt2x00 Project website
rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page which was installed as
gentoo ebuild net-wireless/rt2570-1.1.0_beta1 and required full
pre-built kernel sources.<br>
<br>
The docs on the Gentoo Hardware Wiki gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_rt2500
mentioned that some kernel options can cause a kernel lockup, namely
IO-APIC and pre-empting, so these were disabled before building.<br>
<br>
The USB NIC booted first time, got configured and ran without any problems at all. :)<br>
It started with 128 bit WEP talking to a Linksys WAG354G adsl 802.11g
router with MAC access restrictions, and connected with no errors.<br>
<br>
Next attempts will be to add netfilter kernel patches and to rebuild the kernel with the IO-APIC option enabled.<br>
<br>
Apart from the time spent searching for successful installations, everything was very brief and satisfying.<br>

Detected correctly and easily installed in Suse 10.0 - works well with no dropouts. NOT detected in Suse 10.1. As a newbie, this is disappointing and I've yet to figure out how to make it work.

Desktop system with AMD64 3400+ and Asus K8V SE Deluxe mobo.

Installed the serialmonkey.com rt2570 driver with no major headaches. WEP encryption not a problem.

The ride got a little wild when I tried for WPA encryption. Based on my own experience of one install, I would add the caution that if WPA is your goal, the rt2570 driver may give you some trouble. Hopefully, the development team will solve this soon.

An update to my posting of June 2006.

In OpenSuse 10.1 and 10.2, this product is detected but results in the installation of the rt2500usb module which also gets you the wlan interface. I cannot get this to work. Instead, I rmmod rt2500usb and install/modprobe the serialmonkey rt2570 module.This works very well. WEP encryption is possible but WPA-PSK is not recognised.