Comment 45 for bug 186465

Sadly I can reproduce this. It hangs claiming "Checking package manager". From the (attached) strace output, there is a rather desperate effort made to find a non-existent translations file all over the various sources followed by the hang. The last line in main.log is

  2008-04-24 05:09:06,836 DEBUG running doUpdate() (showErrors=False)

In my case I am using a squid proxy server (configured in /etc/apt/apt.conf). Based on previous work I did writing a proxy for apt for use in a development/build environment, apt is exceedingly flaky when connections don't go exactly its way. For example if a mirror/proxy closes a connection when apt doesn't want it closed then apt will return an error or hang, even though it is perfectly valid http. Completely wiping the squid cache didn't fix things nor did disabling the use of a proxy.

An install on another machine a few hours ago went just fine even though it was using exactly the same proxy.