yum and aptitude behind proxy

I was at a client yesterday setting up vmware server on Fedora 8 and on Ubuntu 7.10. Both machines were behind a proxy, so no direct connection to port 80.

Yum on Fedora just hangs if you type yum update. Whereas aptitude update informs you that it cannot connect to servers.

Someone said to set $HTTP_PROXY, and that worked on the Fedora, but not Ubuntu. So i googled and saw $http_proxy which is the correct variable on Ubuntu...and only then i remembered that i just read this solution last week.

vmware server on Ubuntu 7.04

Yesterday i started teaching linux. There were thirteen identical computers in the classroom, so i brought Ubuntu CD's for everyone. I installed Ubuntu on my computer without problems, then copied the vmware server files that i downloaded last week.

I run vmware-install.pl and it fails...true, i need the vmware-any-any-update. I run the runme.pl and vmware server installs without a glitch.

I have all students copy the files to their machines, and run the runme.pl and it fails. It fails on all of them. "can't exec /etc/.vmware/installer.sh" and "unable to open installer database" with "/etc/vmware/locations".

root@dtpaul:~/vmware# ll
total 8.0K
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K 2007-07-31 14:35 vmware-any-any-update105
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4.0K 2007-07-31 14:36 vmware-server-distrib
root@dtpaul:~/vmware# vmware-server-distrib/vmware-install.pl
root@dtpaul:~/vmware# vmware-any-any-update105/runme.pl
root@dtpaul:~/vmware#

Solution:
Turns out that first running the vmware-insatll.pl, knowing that it will fail, solves the problem. After that, the runme.pl works fine.