Comment 19 for bug 628087

I'll let Michael or someone from the design team speak on why this should not be exposed in the user interface. That said, with guidance from the design team, we've taken great pains to remove dialogs, especially the advanced dialog, from the installer. If we are to at some point add the hostname input box back, I'd prefer it stay on the user setup page.

So everyone is clear on the current behavior, instead of asking for a hostname, the installer automatically generates one. It does this by taking the username, removing any non-alphanumeric character from it, and appending "-laptop" or "-desktop", depending on the output of laptop-detect.

Advanced users can still set their own hostname by putting netcfg/get_hostname=ubuntupad on the live CD's kernel command line. To do this, press a key when you see the "keyboard = accessibility options" image, then select a language, press F6, followed by escape.