I figured I'd post this here in case anyone looks for info on the subject since I found nothing when I looked. Let me know if you think some of this info should go up on the wiki.

I was helping a friend set up a knoppmyth system as a gift and having wifi would save him a lot of wiring work. Since the shuttle case he bought only had one PCI slot, we picked up a USB wireless adapter from Newegg (this one I believe http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6833130111 ). After a while of searching and trying driver wrappers and such, we found out about the rt2570 drivers ( http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/ ) from a comment on Newegg. After messing with that a bit we then accidently found that someone had already included an install script in the distribution. I would guess its from KnoppMyth but I found no reference to it anywhere here or the wiki. Anyways, after that long intro, here's how to install any supported USB wifi adapter. (hardware list is here http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Hardware ) I'm not sure if its required but I install the wireless tools package with a simple 'apt-get install wireless-tools'

(This is on r5a26)

Have wired ethernet plugged and the USB adapter unplugged.
run 'sh /usr/local/bin/rt2570-setup.sh'
this will download the newest CVS version of the driver then install
follow the prompts regarding encryption and when told to, unplug ethernet, plug in the adapter and hit enter.
That should be it and it will try to connect.

I'm not sure why such a handy script has not been mentioned or documented anywhere around here. Here's some extra information in case you have problems: (note: rausb0 refers to the name of my adapter, it may be different for you)

-The script has an offline mode that doesn't redownload the drivers with a '--nodownload' flag. I'm not sure if it has an old version already available for the first run but this is useful if you need to reinstall and don't want to hook up ethernet again.

-If you want to check that the adapter is actually seeing your access point, 'iwlist rausb0 scan' will list all access points it sees.

-After working for a couple days, suddenly the machine would stop right before the DCHPDISCOVER steps during bootup or manual connection. After some trial and error I found that if I ran 'ifconfig rausb0 up' before connecting, it would work. In order to make this run during boot and before the apadter was connecting, I created a 'script' for the interfaces file to run since the functionality to do so is already there.

create the script with 'nano /etc/interfaces/if-up.d/zzz'
I called it zzz just so it would run after the wireless-tools script, not sure if thats required.
Make the contents of the file this:
#!/bin/sh
ifconfig rausb0 up

That's it, now the adapter works again.