Gettin' wifi to work on my Raspberry Pi

Lately I've been geeking out with my Rapsberry Pi, which I've had for about a month now. I've now got all the accessories that I think I'm gonna need for it. Check out the setup:

Good fun for all nerds in the land

My most recent addition was a wifi dongle. I got a dongle with the Ralink 5370 chipset in it, which seems to be pretty popular in Raspberry Pi land. This is the adapter I got and the site where I purchased:

Ralink 5730 Dongle on DX.com

(Word to the wise though, it took 3 weeks for my order to get to me. Shipping costs were free, but that was a tough wait. You might want to pay to speed shipping up or find another dongle from another site.)

I didn't know what it would be like to get the dongle working, but as it turns out, it's very easy. Here's some notes on my experiences:

• As it turns out, if you've burned your Pi distro image anytime probably within the last 6 months or sooner, you've got more or less what you need to get the Ralink and probably many other chipsets working.
• This post had the info I needed to get things working:
  http://raspberry-pi-notes.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/rt5370-cheap-micro-usb-wireless-dongle.html
• In short, you can remove anything related to "wlan0" and just put in what is in step 8 of that post. 
• But! know what type of encryption you have on your wifi router. After logging in to my router I found out it was WPA-PSK, and the lines related to "wireless-*****" were not relevant. Al posted the way to modify the interfaces file - remove the "wireless-*****" lines and instead put:
  
  wpa-ssid <yourssid>
  wpa-psk <yourkey>
  
  Which means that only 4 lines are required in the interfaces file to get the dongle working.
• I use a Logitech wireless keyboard when I'm directly working on the Pi; you can sort of see its little dongle in the bottom USB port in my picture. Interestingly, when I had both the wifi dongle and keyboard dongle in the standard Pi USB ports, the keyboard wouldn't work. I'm thinking the wifi radio signal was drowning out the keyboard signal. Moving the wifi dongle over to the small hub I've got made things work.

And with that, my Pi is now happily connecting to the internet, at least when in terminal mode. I can ssh to it and everything. Best of luck as you attempt to get wifi working on your Pi!