Comment 25 for bug 1173759

I had the same problem. The driver seems to be a bit fickle in what it doesn't like. I was able to get it to connect periodically by changing channels and going back and forth from N to G. I don't know much about drivers but perhaps this was causing the drive to reload? If you don't have a Ethernet cable handy I'd try restarting your router with a few different settings to get it (the card) to connect long enough to apply a fix.

I was able to resolve the issues by installing an unstable build of [firmware-ralink](http://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-ralink)

Note: If you are reading this in the far off future the updated firmware will probably be available in the [linux-firmware ppa](https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-firmware). I'd check there before following my solution. At the time of this writing it was at *1.106* which did not contain the fixed ralink firmware

Here are the steps I went through;

1. Added "deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free"
to my apt sources (/etc/apt/sources.list)

I just wanted the deb file for firmware-ralink but I was too lazy to google and figure out how to pull the deb directly. You will need to make sure you REMOVE this line from your sources.list immediately after installing or you risk conflicting packages in the future. There is nothing worse than a conflicting kernel update.

2. Ran
 $ sudo apt-get update
 $ sudo apt-get -t unstable install firmware-ralink

3. At this point I got an error

"
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/firmware-ralink_0.39_all.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
"

4. So I forced the install by running:

$ sudo dpkg --force overwrite -i /var/cache/apt/archives/firmware-ralink_0.39_all.deb

5. After that I removed the line from sources.list and ran $ sudo apt-get update to clear the cache of
debian packages.

Everything seems resolved now.