Just installed Squeeze using first CD (from a couple weeks ago), and specifying a mirror during install. After booting into the new install, I:
* added myself to sudoers using visudo
* sudo aptitude install gnome-do - this completed fine and gnome-do works.
* about an hour later I came back and tried to sudo aptitude update and this is when the error first popped up.
I searched my processes and find the same apt-get -qq -y update as the OP noted. But also I see that there is a daily apt cron job running, confirming gradinaruvasile's comment:
tblack@tblackld:~$ ps -ef | grep apt
root 1974 1970 0 08:05 ? 00:00:00 /bin/sh /etc/cron.daily/apt
root 2014 1974 99 08:23 ? 02:24:35 apt-get -qq -y update
root 2017 2014 0 08:23 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/apt/methods/http
root 2018 2014 0 08:23 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/apt/methods/http
root 2019 2014 0 08:23 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/apt/methods/cdrom
root 2022 2014 0 08:23 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/apt/methods/gpgv
tblack 2615 2222 0 10:49 pts/0 00:00:00 grep apt
So, this is a cron job, and it appears to be either taking a ridiculous amount of time to complete, or it is blocked in the background for some reason unbeknownst to us bc the cron script runs apt-get in quiet mode.
I have installed from the same CD onto another machine and didn't have this problem. Not sure what's going on. My software sources look like this:
tblack@tblackld:~$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
#
# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux testing _Squeeze_ - Official Snapshot i386 CD Binary-1 20101018-04:31]/ squeeze main
deb
http://debian.osuosl.org/debian/ squeeze main
deb-src
http://debian.osuosl.org/debian/ squeeze main
deb
http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main
deb-src
http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main
and my network connection is working and I can ping debian.osuosl.org and security.debian.org.
It's been running for a total of about 6 hours so far. After a few hours, I rebooted the machine, only to find the apt-get job running silently in the background again after about 30 minutes. I am going to give it another hour or so to complete and then I'll kill it.
Let me know if you have any ideas.
...oh, I had one. So I looked in the apt log and found a list of apt operations, many of which occurred during the time I was installing Squeeze. At the end of the list was the "Install: gnome-do" operation. All operations have a Start-Date and an End-Date, so I won't feel so bad killing the current apt-get cron job.