Is there, or what is the benefit to having /boot on a seperate partition?
if so, what size should it be?

jturnbul; ? not clear,what specifically intent on doing? beside booting what size hdd & os,s intalling? each os requires certain amount of space to operate on including swapspace.
a simple answer yes, would accomodate
dual booting without interfering each other. suggestion: please next time add bit more info pertinent to ?.

well I had fedora core 2 on my laptop, dual booting with XP. I have been triple booting Win2K, fedora, and Slack on my desktop. I have decided I enjoy Slack the most, and going to go with Slack only.

I'm going to install slack on my laptop, and wondering if I should use the existing fedora partitions, as fedora by default breaks your partition into a swap, / , and /boot. I notice with Slack it will just use a / , and swap partition. just curious what is the better route to go and any benefit one way or the other.

btw my HD is 80 gigs with 60 going to XP, and the other 20 to Linux

sorry if I was vague, assumed peeps would know what i was talking about.

Really the only benefit to having /boot on its own partition is one of safety. You can set up your FSTAB to make /boot read only, so you're assured nothing is going to ever change in there unless you go through the steps to do it yourself. Otherwise, Slackware runs just fine with only a / and /swap partition.

You can have anything on different partitions. Some people make them for /var, /tmp, /home, etc, all for different reasons. It all comes down to personal preference and need.

But this is a huge benefit, and if you are concerned about security (which you should be) then the /boot partition should be mounted as read-only in fstab, just as Makaelin suggested.

You are correct that /boot does not have to be explicitly defined and given its own partition, however, it would be good practice to do so IMO. In terms of size, a 32Mg /boot partition should be plenty. You can go bigger, but more than 128Mg is probably just a waste of disk space, considering that the typical kernel is usually only a little more than 1Mg.

Not to go overboard with partitioning, but if you have 20G to give to Linux (you might want to consider reversing the amounts you are giving to each OS ) then I would suggest a 32Mg /boot, a 256Mg swap, a 6G / and the rest to /home. (Putting /home on its own partition is also a good idea, as it separates your personal data from all system data. This allows you to upgrade to a newer release of Slack, or to switch to an entirely different distro, without having to take any special steps other than to *not* format your /home partition when you are doing the fresh installation.)

Note that partitioning is totally subjective, and everybody has their own ideas as to what is "best" - there is no real right or wrong way to do it. Good luck with it either way. You are making a good choice by going with Slack -- J.W.