How to make hostname survive boot

The brain is beginning to congeal.  My Dell XPS 710 has just given up 
the host so over to the laptop.  In the past I have successfully changed 
the hostname such that it survived a reboot.  Cannot remember the 
prescription.  Ran "hostname canopus" as root and aliased localhost to 
canopus in the /etc/hosts file.

viz:
x.x.x.x canopus
127.0.0.1 localhost canopus

It survives repeated logins but not a reboot.  According to what I read 
on the web the initialization routines read /etc/hostname at boot time.

What else should be done?

Len



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