John,

I had the exact same problem for a long time. Then I upgraded my Linux (from
Debian 1.3.1 to a Red Hat 6.0 variant) and it went away. The exact same VMs and
images now work perfectly, so it is certainly a Linux problem and not a Squeak
one.

Everything else on the Linux box resolved names perfectly, and all of the rest
of Squeak networking was in order as well (by using nslookup to manually
resolve the names and typing in the IPs in Squeak the music/pages/etc would
download).

I am sorry I can't help, but at least you can be sure that the fix is on the
Linux side...

-- Jecel