Thanks Maarten.
I was able to install sage-mode by downloading it to a temporary directory and then sage -i <PATH_TOSPKG_FILE>.
About the proxy, I managed a workaround in two ways:
1. exporting http_proxy="http://user:passwd@server:port/" from the commandline and then execute sage -i package_name. (Also I suspect that here DNS setting also had some role! Guess there was some problem with my DNS settings.)
2. Insert the following two lines at the start of sage-download_package:
proxy = "http://user:passwd@server:port/"
urlprx = UrllibProxy(proxy)
and then replace the line
urllib.urlretrieve(url, file, reporthook)
with
urlprx.urlretrieve(url, file, reporthook)
By the way sage package repository has still the sage-mode-0.6.
By the way during this process I was wondering how does one "uninstall" a package? The sage
documentation does not say anything about uninstall (at least I couldnt find easily.)
Regards
VInay