How you partition depends on your needs. Here are some reasons to make certain directories as separate partitions ( on a single hard drive. The situation is different when you have multiple hard drives). It the reason does not apply to you then don't make that directory a separate partition.
/boot - If you are using a very old BIOS then you may have to place /boot at the beginning of the hard drive in order to be able to boot.
swap - Swap as a separate partition runs much faster than a swap file.
/home - When you upgrade your Linux distribution it is easier to preserve your personal data if /home is a separate partition.
/var - If you get a lot of log messages then the logs will consume all of the free space in the partition. When this happens Linux will crash. If /var is on its own partition then only logging will cease. This problem happens sometimes to servers.
/usr - There is no advantage to having a separate /usr partition on a single hard drive system.
/ - A slash partition is required.
/tmp - Similar to /var. It is possible for a rogue program to fill up an entire partition's free space with garbage in /tmp. Linux is less likely to crash if /tmp is a separate partition.
"I did get some advise to set up a 120gb hd as:
swap (x2 RAM, Max 2048M)"
Swap being 2x RAM is a rule of thumb developed when RAM and hard drives were much smaller. If you have 1024M RAM then 512M swap is more than enough.
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Steve Stites
