Comment 4 for bug 64334

I can confirm the issues with Ralink/rt2500 based cards on Ubuntu 6.10. The reason is that 6.10 is shipped with a faulty driver that causes these problems. Usage of Wpa-supplicant is not possible either at this point as a workaround. Indeed the only way to get the card working with the default driver is to do 'sudo dhclient ra0' after every startup. Needless to say this is a pain. Well... there is good news. I solved this problem and it was not too hard (I am not a linux expert but I will post the steps I followed). To put it in simple words, you need to install a new (and better) driver. First you need to go to the rt2x00 webpage (http://2x00.serialmonkey.com) and go to the download section. There you look for one of the 2500-cvs-... drivers (tar) and download it. Then you follow these steps... that did it for me. After restarting the computer everything worked like a charm... internet connection at startup !!! I just used the same configuration in /etc/network/interfaces that I had in Ubuntu 6.06. Happily connected with WPA that is supported by the driver (like I said before, forget messing with wpa_supplicant, is a waste of time).

1. go to TERMINAL
2. go to directory where you downloaded the 2500-cvs...tar.gz
3. type: tar -xzf rt2500-cvs-daily.tar.gz
4. type: sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
5. type: cd ./rt2500-cvs-*/Module
6. type: make
7. To test, type: sudo insmod rt2500.ko (all it does is telling me that it already exists)

Exit TERMINAL

1. Select: [System] – [Administration] – [Networking]
2. Find the wireless card, then Select  [Activate]

To finish up the install

1. go to TERMINAL
2. type: sudo ifdown ra0
3. type: sudo cp ~/rt2500-cvs-daily/Module/rt2500.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/
4. type: echo "alias ra0 rt2500" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/rt2500

If you have similar success, feel free to post this on other boards or leave feedback here to help out other frustrated users. May the Force be with you :)