The card is cost €25 and with a small manual and a cdrom with all sorts of Windows stuff on it so I quickly packed up. I installed the card, rebooted the PC and amazingly enough it was instantaneously recognized, the rt2500pci and related kernel modules automatically loaded and ready to be configured. That’s the cool thing about Linux. It really works straight out of the box if it’s supported. Kudo’s to RaLink, the people who such a breeze from the RT2X00 project and the kernel developers for making this!
With my shiny new Wi-Fi card installed and recognized I noticed that the output of iwconfig showed that the card was assigned wlan1. Strange as I would suspect it be wlan0 given the fact that it was the only Wi-Fi card in the box. I checked /var/log/messages then I noticed this message:
This one had me stumped for a while but then I remembered that some months back I had tried to get a SpeedTouch 121G Wi-Fi USB stick working which was not a success. These days udev has persistence so that might have something to do with choosing wlan1 over wlan0. And then I checked out /etc/udev/rules,d/70-persistent-net,rules and the ndiswrapper entry with name wlan0 for the SpeedTouch 121G was in there. I removed the entry, changed the name of the rt2500pci entry to wlan0, rebooted the box and then the rt2500pci card came up as wlan0.
The last thing was configuring the card in system-config-network, adding an entry in the DHCP server and allowing the card access to the Wi-Fi router. The result: one working pci Wi-Fi card in 15 minutes. Now Linux was thought difficult 
