Comment 2 for bug 103573

I downloaded the source of the rt2500 package shipped with ubuntu and reading the diff file I noticed that it was patched to use eth0 as the default device name, while the driver uses the standard device name ra0. thus the error. it is not necessary to recompile the utility, just
sudo vi /etc/rt2x00.conf
put a single line with
ra0
in the file and save now it works.