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I was just installing 12.04 beta2 when I noticed something really odd. I was at the screen where you enter your username/hostname/password/etc. I typed 'Me' for my real name as I normally do. This is the weird part. The installer filled in the hostname as 'me-###-##5-1544' where the ###-##5-1544 is my parent's land-line phone number (about two hundred miles west of where i am). Where did the installer get that number? I am installing over a previous install of ubuntu, but that was a throw-away install that I never put that number on. I have other partitions and other OSes on this hard drive, but none were mounted at the time of install and none were selected to be used as mount points in the previous screen.

Picture of what I'm talking about:

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What the installer does is getting your computers name. It's pretty strange that it's this telephone number, normally it's something like Acer-Aspire-X3300.

Perhaps your computers vendor got that telephone number and made it the computers name (I have no idea if some do this intentionally, else it could've been a mistake), or someone edited the name (perhaps it's a special BIOS feature on some Computers).

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It's a value that can be changed and is stored in your BIOS, so that's probably what happened, indeed. I assembled my new computer myself, when Ubuntu 12.04 gets released I'm going to see what it says about that, as most programs just display Computer manufacturer: Enter manufacturer name here :p – RobinJ Apr 23 '12 at 14:32
This is a custom built desktop. I might have modified the windows registry to put me as the manufacturer, but I doubt that would have changed anything on the BIOS level. I will check when I get home – Huckle Apr 23 '12 at 17:22

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