Bob,
Yes, mandrake on sparc!
See:
http://www.ultralinux.org/faq.html
Mandrake has worked better than redhat (for me) and I have stuck with it
since. An example: my "new" SCSI drives came from a RAID array. Redhat and
Suse curled up and died with the "unknown" format on the drives. Mandrake
just asked if I wanted to reformat and trundled on. As far as I am
concerned, most of a given distro revolves around the installer and packaged
applications. The Mandrake installer has consistently dealt with the weird
hardware I have laying around better than other distros, on all my boxen.

I agree that localhost is special.
Hostname gives me:
Localhost.localdomain

What brought all this on is that I tire of my prompt saying:
[markb at localhost markb]$
I guess that I should have asked about the "localdomain" part.
Or is this special too?

Should I be setting my domain to something if I don't have one?
Somehow, it does not seem that using "Comcast.net" is the right thing.

Mark Browne


-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Hartmann [mailto:bhartm at visi.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 10:49 PM
To: Mark Browne
Subject: Re: [tclug-list] Stupid newbie question


Hey Mark,
localhost is not the domain name. localhost is a builtin thing and 
should not be altered, like 127.0.0.1. It's the host, meaning THIS 
DEVICE, or THIS NODE.
Try "hostname" and "info hostname"
For adding other nodes as names to Linux, Unix or BSD, it's in 
/etc/hosts, just like the hosts file on Windows. (I don't remember where 
that is) Check out http://tldp.org/LDP/nag/node62.html. Look at the 
links at the top of the page!


127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 hitshed
10.0.0.44 thatotherthing

cat /etc/nsswitch.conf
hosts: files dns

Did I hear you right? Mandrake on Sparc?


Mark Browne wrote:

> When I set up my linux boxen I have been leaving the domain name as 
> localhost. My ISP is Comcast.net and I don't have my own domain name 
> to plug in.
>
> I know that this is sort of retarded, but I have no clue about the 
> correct thing to do here.
>
> If it makes any difference, I want to network (samba?) my Mandrake-Sun 
> Sparc, Mandrake Intel, OS X Mac, AMD-64 XP, and Intel XP boxen 
> together later.
>
> A pointer to a good how-to would be nice.
>
> Mark Browne
>
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