Ok, I'm having a nightmare with yocto and linux too. I think it's different to the above, but here goes:
I am running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on a virtual machine (Oracle VM Virtualbox).
I'm using the latest version of linux/yocto etc from here:
http://rocketboards.org/foswiki/view/documentation/gsrd150compilinglinuxarrowsockitedition If I try and build the kernel, it gets most of the way along but has stopped every time trying to download socfpga-3.10-ltsi with "git://
github.com/altera-opensource/linux-socfpga.git;protocol=https;branch=socfpga-3.10-ltsi".
If I copy the job from ps -fT xxx | more into a script and run it from there, it runs and downloads fine.
eg: /bin/sh -c export SSH_AGENT_PID="1502"; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK="/tmp/keyring-DOkxUK/ssh"; export PATH="/home/user/poky2/angstrom-socfpga/sources/openembedded-core/scripts:/home/user/poky2/angstrom-socfpga/build/tmp-angstrom_v2014_12-glibc/sysroots/i686-linux/usr/bin/arm-angstrom-linux-gnueabi:/home/user/poky2/angstrom-socfpga/build/tmp-angstrom_v2014_12-glibc/sysroots/cyclone5/usr/bin/crossscripts:/home/user/poky2/angstrom-socfpga/build/tmp-angstrom_v2014_12-glibc/sysroots/i686-linux/usr/sbin:/home/user/poky2/angstrom-socfpga/build/tmp-angstrom_v2014_12-glibc/sysroots/i686-linux/usr/bin:/home/user/poky2/angstrom-socfpga/build/tmp-angstrom_v2014_12-glibc/sysroots/i686-linux/sbin:/home/user/poky2/angstrom-socfpga/build/tmp-angstrom_v2014_12-glibc/sysroots/i686-linux/bin:/home/user/poky2/angstrom-socfpga/sources/openembedded-core/scripts:/home/user/poky2/angstrom-socfpga/sources/bitbake/bin:/opt/altera-linux/linaro/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-4.7-2012.11-20121123_linux/bin/:/home/user/bin:/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games"; export HOME="/home/user"; git -c core.fsyncobjectfiles=0 clone --bare --mirror
https://github.com/altera-opensource/linux-socfpga.git /home/user/poky2/angstrom-socfpga/sources/downloads/git2/github.com.altera-opensource.linux-socfpga.git
So why will it work from the command line, download anything else with bitbake, but it can't do this one.
And having downloaded it into the right directory, it still wants to download it again, but presumably that's because it can't flag that it's done it rather than me.