You are prompt for the following information:
This is the name of the machine. The machine may have several, but there is one which is more important (more official). The name may be composed of letters and numbers. The case is not important. It also contain the domain name.
The machine is part of a set of machine under a common administration. This domain name is generally used for email. If you don't know what to write there then use the domain name of your Internet provider. Put only a single word (name without domain) if you have no idea.
ex: pcjack.mydomain.com
The machine may have nickname for different purpose. You can specify several on the line, separated by spaces.
If you machine is on a network (Ethernet probably), you must enter its IP number. If there is no IP network currently installed on your LAN, you can leave this empty.
You can set the IP address of the first Ethernet adaptor to 127.0.0.1. Linuxconf will prompt you about this anyway if you left this field blank.
Choosing this number will allows you to operate normally with full networking even if you don't have any Ethernet adaptor. You may want to do this for the following reasons.
PPP
or SLIP
networking.If you are setting up a new isolated LAN (Not connected to the Internet, the IP network 192.168.1.0 is a good choice. This is a network number specifically allocated for private network. If your network gets hook to the Internet later (through a firewall for example), your network number won't class with an existing network, so the gateway won't be confused.
Pick an IP number for your machine between 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.254. The Network address will be 192.168.1.0
Your IP number may be parsed into two components: The network part and the station ID. For example, a station having the IP number 192.168.1.10 belong to the network 192.168.1.0 and do have the ID 10. It is common practice to express a network address using four numbers, where the one corresponding to the station ID are 0.
This field is optional (like the netmask) below. Unless there is sub-netting on your LAN.
Unless you are doing some sub-netting, you can leave this field empty. Your administrator will provide a magic sequence like 255.255.255.192 if there is sub-netting on you LAN.