anyone who uses ubuntu lucid 10.04(behind proxy) would have faced issues connecting to internet either in download(using wget) or during package installation using apt-get(). This is because even though you have set proxy using export http_proxy=<ur-proxy-ip>:<port> or configured the same in system wide network settings, the actual http request doesn't seem to go through the proxy(atleast from the logs). Actually the real culprit is the env variable no_proxy :) if you print all the environment variables you will find that the environment variable no_proxy has a trailing comma which it should not. so the solution to the problem is to add the following line to your bashrc file. export no_proxy=$(echo $no_proxy | sed 's/,$//') once this is done you should be able to use wget / apt-get tool etc.....without any issues :)