I bought an USB WIFI dongle, on ebay, to use with the Raspberry Pi. I thought the chip was a Ralink chip which is supported, but it turned out it was a MediaTek MT7601.

Bus 001 Device 005: ID 148f:7601 Ralink Technology, Corp.

All this is for Raspian and I have gathered all the steps needed here.

Driver

2015 August update

There are now a couple of alternative drivers, and an in kernel one, from 4.2 on.

Old MediaTek driver

The driver is available at MediaTek's download page here (there is an error on that page, select 71610U for linux. Link. Find the one called "MT7601U USB". I have the file mirrored here.

These instructions work for building the driver.

Become root.

sudo -s

Download latest updates.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
rpi-update

Download linux kernel source, this is needed to compile the driver module.

cd /usr/src
git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux.git
sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build
cd linux

Prepare the kernel with the current kernel config from the running system.

make mrproper
zcat /proc/config.gz > .config
cp .config .config.org
make modules_prepare

Download the module symbols of the current kernel, to avoid having to recompile the kernel.

wget https://raw.github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/master/extra/Module.symvers

Get the MT7601 USB driver into your home directory. Then, lets uncompress the file.

cd ~ 
tar -xvjpf DPO_MT7601U_LinuxSTA_3.0.0.4_20130913.tar.bz2 
cd DPO*

The default driver is really noisy and spits out a lot of debug information. This behaviour can be stopped by changing a line in os/linux/rt_linux.c from:

ULONG RTDebugLevel = RT_DEBUG_TRACE;

to:

ULONG RTDebugLevel = 0; // RT_DEBUG_TRACE;

Finally build the driver and install it.

make
make install

Raspbian configuration

Configure the ra0 interface for DHCP and make it start at boot. Edit /etc/network/interfaces to look like:

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto ra0
allow-hotplug ra0
iface ra0 inet dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
iface default inet dhcp

Then add your WIFI name and key to /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf.

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1

network={
        ssid="YOURWIFINAME"
        key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
        psk="YOURPASSWORD"
}

The wireless network is then brought up by:

ifup ra0

or a reboot.