ZenLinux Blog

A big warning to the many users behind a proxy server who will be installing Ubuntu Lucid Lynx soon: wget isn’t going to work. You can read the details in this bug report on Launchpad.

Basically the problem is that if your proxy exclusion list ends with a comma character, wget can’t parse the $no_proxy environment variable and defaults to not using your proxy (usually configured in ~/.wgetrc or via the $http_proxy/$ftp_proxy environment variables). And the GNOME Network Proxy UI apparently leaves a trailing comma in there if you make changes to the ignored hosts list.

The quick workaround is to add the following to your ~/.bashrc:

export no_proxy=$(echo $no_proxy | sed 's/,$//')

I spent a couple of days figuring this out, so I hope it helps someone else. I don’t see any way the fix will be included in Lucid before it ships on Thursday, so people will need to use this workaround until then. It’s a shame because as an LTS release, a lot of enterprise users are going to run into problems right out of the gate.