Thanks both of you for your help. Your answers were both helpful, and between them and this guide that I found (
http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...a_Linux_System ), I think I know what I need.
Pixellany, here's my situation: I am making probably my fifth attempt in the last ten years to set up a useful Linux box. I have installed Ubuntu 6.06 (though I think I'm going to change that to 6.10 soon) on an old computer that I cobbled together from spare parts.
I am familiar with partitions in general, but I am clueless about how one should smartly divide up a Linux system. (Well, I -was- clueless; your post and the afore-mentioned tutorial have helped remedy that.)
Unfortunately, because it's a spare-part machine, hard drive space is limited. I have a 10 gig drive and a 1 gig drive. Right now it's installed, but not divvied up the way I want, so I think I'm going to redo the whole thing. When I do, I will make the entire 1 gig drive into a swap partition. Then, because it's so small, I think I might just leave the entire 10 as one partition for everything else. I'd hate to get screwed down the road because I made /tmp or /opt too small.
So far, this is by far my most successful attempt to switch. Frankly, I would format my XP machine right now and install Ubuntu, but I custom built it for video editing, so I'm tied to some Windows software to be able to use all the fancy hardware I bought. :-/
Anyway, thanks again to both of you for your help.
--jim