Running RT2870 based wireless cards on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Ok so you just installed Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). The OS booted fine and you plugged in your RT2870 based USB wireless card (e.g. Alpha 802.11 n, Belkin etc.). Unfortunately, everytime you attempt to connect to a wireless network the Network-Manager app takes forever to connect but never succeeds. What to do?

There has been a bug report in the Release Candidate which interestingly didn't get fixed in the release version of Karmic Koala (Available here)

Apparently, RT2800usb and RT2870sta drivers compete to operate your wireless card resulting in no wireless connectivity. This from what I remember was a problem I faced with 9.04 as well.

The solution is to simply add the line

in the file "/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf"

Restart Ubuntu and voala! Its alive!