I tried out the new version of Knoppix (2.7, I believe). I found that after booting back into Red Hat Fedora, my hostname was set to “Knoppix”. Besides that I was not running a Knoppix system, this was an additional nuisance since I would get an error message stating “Could not resolve hostname Knoppix” when I would try to log on to my Gnome desktop. I couldn’t understand it, since my disk was not mounted read/write by Knoppix as far as I could tell. I checked the entire /etc directory by using “grep -r Knoppix /etc/*”, but could not find any configuration that contained the word Knoppix, save a printer configuration file that gets written at boot time. After looking around on Google at bit, I cam across a message that mentions this problem. When Knoppix tries to configure the network cards via DHCP, it sends the hostname out as “Knoppix”. Fedora and some other versions of Linux don’t do this. The DHCP server remembers the name of the interface as belonging to ‘Knoppix”, so when the machine is rebooted and a different operating system wants to use the DHCP to configure itself, the server reports that the host name should be Knoppix. The suggestion given where I read about this (don’t know where it was this second) suggested rebooting both the computer and the router at the same time. This solution was not an option for me since I have a cable connection to the internet, and I do not have my own router. I found that I could rectify the problem by releasing the DHCP lease and rebooting (this can be done on my Fedora 3 system by logging is as root and typing: dhclient -r).

I really believe that Knoppix should not be setting the hostname in the router which messes everything up and forces me to release my hostname.