Yes, you will certainly burn for this.  :-)

Mike Timmons:

I'll show you how MINE works (and if someone out there can point out errors, fire away -- I'm not making the claim that this is completely correct).  I hope that this will be new and helpful information for you.  If it's not, my apologies; feel free to dump this in the bit bucket.

In my /sbin/hotplug I have a bunch of stuff for doing field updates, but at the very bottom, I have this:

if [ "$1" == "firmware" ] && [ "$ACTION" == "add" ]; then
  echo 1 > /sys/$DEVPATH/loading
  cat /lib/firmware/$FIRMWARE > /sys/$DEVPATH/data
  echo 0 > /sys/$DEVPATH/loading
  echo "RT73 firmware loaded." > /dev/console
fi

That's how the firmware is loaded.

caveat: I am using 2.6.25 in my system.  I have no idea what's changed from .24 to .25 that might be getting in your way.  You could consider moving just the section in .25 that deals with the chipsets in question (ralink, I think??).

I put all this together in about an hour after doing a little reading.  It all works very well.

Now if I could just get that pesky AP mode working...

Also in my hotplug script is

if [ "$1" == "net" ] && [ "$ACTION" == "add" ] && [ "$INTERFACE" == "wlan0" ]; then
  iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
  iwconfig wlan0 channel auto
  iwconfig wlan0 key DADADADADADADADADADADADADA
  iwconfig wlan0 essid mlxwap
fi

You will want to get the sources for the wifi utilities compiled for your target, too.  Not hard to do.  I don't think I had to make any changes to it.

Those who wish, feel free to post suggestions, etc.  I'm doing all of my work on an ARM target, so I don't know if there are any gotchas in the rt drivers for the rt73 usb stuff.

Also, you could check out rt2x00.serialmonkey.com if you haven't found it.  They are live (well, mostly dead) on #rt2x00 on freenode.

Good luck; if you have questions, feel free to email me directly.