If this is for work it may be a good idea to setup the system with at least 3 partitions. Root / on its own, /home and then swap, if you put / on a 20GB or so partition that will give ample room for installing software. Let /home be the biggest for storing all your files and working with. If your system has 2GB of ram you will only need to have a 512mb swap.

Reason for this setup.

If you have a separate /home if for any reason the OS gets trashed you can rebuild without worrying about losing your data. (You should still keep backups though.) But the nice thing about linux is you can set it up any way you want.......

I think you may have drifted away from that idea somewhat, but I would advise you not to use a separate partition for /etc, as that will stop the computer from booting (at the time of boot, the computer needs information in /etc/fstab to mount the partitions beyond / and that's not available until the /etc partition has been mounted, which is a bit of a catch 22...I think that there is some kind of clever hack to get around that, but why would you do it? why not just settle for a simpler, working partition system?).

I'd agree with most of the other who have already posted; swap is good, a separate home partition is good, but beyond that, you have to have a good reason for multiplying the number of partitions.

BTW, you mention a /data partition; you could certainly do that, but you would probably be equally well served by a structure under /home/data, without the need for a separate partition. Of course that would mean that you would make /home bigger.

You mentioned wanting a stable work environment. I don't want to start a distro war here, but it is true that different folks need different distros. FC is not known to be stable. You might be better off going with it's cousin Centos if you want a red-hat like distro. Debian and SUSE are also good alternatives for stable systems. If you go with *ubuntu, you might choose one of the LTS (Long-term-support) releases.

If you also want to tinker around with low-level stuff, then create a dedicated partition to contain your experimental distros, and set grub up for dual boot. Try them one at a time. There are plenty to choose from, like Gentoo, LFS, Slackware, Arch, etc. Getting any of those into a productive state will teach you a lot about Linux in general.

Good luck

This is exactly what I want to do. At the moment Fedora is what I know and what I use at work so I will stick to that but I will experiment with other distros to see if anythign works better for me.

I have decided on my partition scheme and it seems that having /, swap and /home should suffice. I may add a /data partition also but we will see.

I appreciate all of your input!
I will let you know how it works out.

SimGuy

If you're worried about runaway processes/hack attempts causing a lot of logging, put /var on its own partition.
That way if it fills up you'll still be able to login.

With Ubuntu, Gentoo, Slackware, and openSUSE I have been using an ext2 /boot partition, an ext3 / partition, and swap. But it's really as much as I've done.

Never installed a Fedora, or any other Red Hat or any other Linux, with more than one partition and that is for /. The swap is common for all Linux. Multiple partitions are useful for servers. Why makes things complicated for non-server applications? /boot, /home and all the others can be subdirectories to /.

Fedora needs a separate /boot only if the user opts for a LVM as no boot loader can read it. With a LVM the swap can be inisde it so again 2 partitions are all one needs.