I've just recently decided to start reacquainting myself with linux after a 6 year hiatus. I've settled on the new Mandrake distribution (don't try to persuade me otherwise, please :). The installation offers a myriad of file system choices from journalized to ext3 (?) to name a few and was wondering what file system would be best for my purposes (regular desktop user; no servers; no frill -- just wanting to coexist with windowsXP / possibly migrate to linux)? What's the basic difference between them?

I'll be installing Mandrake on a slave HD protected ;) from my main windows disk. However I will be allotting about 35Gb of the 200 on the linux drive as an XP NTFS scratch disk.

So in summary, what file system should I choose and about how much space should I allocate for a swap partition?

The Filesystems HOWTO gives a good overview of them. For normal use, probably ext3 or reiserfs would be fine.

For swap space, probably equal to the amount of RAM you have would suffice. You could get away with a smaller swap if you have lots of RAM - I have 512MB, and almost never need any swap space (but if you have lots of space, might as well allocate some).

I agree with wapcaplet that the best two for you are Reiser or Ext3. You need a journallised filesystem - it's better in case of power failure or improper shutdown, your data is much more safe than with Ext2 (used before). My personal opinion is that Reiser is better. I had serious problems with Ext3 (reset without shutdown and there was data loss). So I personally recommend Reiser, but other people have different opinions. There's a thread on this forum discussing different filesystems (very long).

I recommend 256 or 512MB swap space. You won't probably need it, but just in case... My machine had never used swap in the last month (I've got 512MB RAM).