I have a RaLink RT2500 wireless lan card in my Amilo Pro v2010 laptop.
I downloaded the serialmonkey driver (since it's not supported in the kernel yet), and compiled it.
It compiled no problems, and i can modprobe rt2500 without problems.
It appears to create an interface called ra0, and iwconfig gives the following:
lo - no wireless extensions
eth0 - no wireless extensions
sit0 - no wireless extensions
ra0 - RT2500 Wireless ESSID:""
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412GHz Bit Rate:1Mb/s
RTS thr: off Fragment thr: off
Encryption key: off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

and ifconfig ra0 can tell me the MAC address.
However, it doesn't appear if i just type ifconfig.
ifconfig ra0 up and dhcpcd ra0 both hang the system.
The device is there, but is crashing when I try to initialise it.
Am I missing a config step somewhere?
Or is there another way to install the driver?

Any help is appreciated.

I have a working rt2500. Do you have a properly set up access point which is known to work with other wireless systems? Should the ESSID be set?

Still, it shouldn't crash. The serialmonkey driver seems to be updated almost daily. Are you using the latest version?

I think you would have a better chance of good advice on the forum for this driver at

http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/phpBB2/

One thing you could try is to delete/move the config file in /etc/Wireless if it is there, and just using iwconfig.