I've forgotten the name of my computer and my need to rename it.
There's a chance I named it incorrectly.

Is there a command I can use in the terminal to determine the name of my laptop
for networking purposes?

try "more /etc/hostname" theres usually a file in /etc/ that is just for the hostname

Thanks for your reply...
I don't see a file called "hostname" inside /etc. I only see the file "hosts" and this contains
only --> 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain local host

Not quite what I'm looking for. But thanks though.

How did you name it initially? You can edit the /etc/hosts files on the other computers so that they have a name for your computer's IP address. However, you'll have to change those /etc/host files any time your IP address changes.

Hi thanks for your response

To be honest, I don't remember ever naming it. I assumed that I did when I installed the OS (referring to a laptop with Mandrake installed). If I wished to give the computer a name how would I do that?

It all depends on why you want it named.

If you want your command prompt to show up as user1@mycomputername instead of user1@localhost, you can edit your own /etc/hosts file. Mine looks like this:

That way my command prompt shows up as user1@darcy (because darcy is the last entry). This way I can still access my http server via http://localhost (as well as http://darcy).

You can edit the /etc/hosts file to relate an IP address of another computer on the network. This was you can, for example, type "ping ted" instead of "ping 192.168.1.123" or whatever. These modifications have to be made on each computer for which you want them to take effect.

If you're using SAMBA, you can edit the config file with a name for your computer so that other computers will see it as having that name.

If you don't have any reason to name your computer, don't worry about it. If you have another reason, just ask. These are the only ones I can think of.