I have a laptop with a 40 gig hard drive and 256mb of memory. Could anyone advise me on how I should partition my hd? I will be using this laptop for school and experimenting with slackware linux.

If you're going to be using it for experimenting and for school, I would definitely put home on a separate partition so that it's easy to back up your personal files. Are you already comfortable using slackware or will you be dual booting with something else? Generally, I use a 3rd party boot loader (XOSL) so I don't have to mess too much with grub or lilo, they just get installed to the root partition. You'll get a thousand different answers to this question, but here's my 2 cents:

10GB root partition (including /boot)
1 GB swap
29GB home partition

If you're dual booting, I'd probably go something like:

1 GB swap
10 GB distro 1 (including /boot & /home)
10 GB distro 2 (including /boot & /home)
19 GB shared partition (Fat 32 if one of your distro's turns out to be WinBlow$)

Just my 2 cents...

Right now im using Ubuntu on this laptop, but its getting boring. I would be using FreeBSD, but no one has ported the DRI drivers to fbsd for my vid card. All my school files are backed up on my school's server, so having a partition for home directories is not a required precaution. Should I just have a swap and the rest of my disk space be put on root? I have been reading that I should also make a /usr partition if plan on upgrading a lot, but whenever I upgrade an OS I just download the programs again and don't keep them from my last installation.

Hi,

Well if it's for experimenting i suggest you make a seperate /boot partition to hold different kernels also.

Partitiontable could look like this:

/boot 25MB (that's alot of space, but good to have if you want to install newer kernels etc.)

/ 4GB (the default installation with the full package takes 2GB,)

/Swap +256MB (rarely used, but good to have if you use demanding programs on your computer

/Home >remaining space< (making a seperate home partition makes it possible to do a reinstall without loosing all your personal files etc.

Good luck and have fun

MadPenguin's SlackwareHandbook and Linux Essentials at Linuxpackages documents and Bitbenderforums give great exmples for partitioning hard drive for SW.
Also google SW install on your notebook model for install/config help.
Have fun.

There have been several threads the past several months about this topic. You'll likely learn a lot by browsing those threads.

If the box is for experimenting, then although this sounds somewhat humorous and tongue-in-cheek, then experiment! That is, install, delete, repartition, install, delete, repartition, etc. As long as the box is for experimenting and contains no critical data files, then you have available one of the great means to learning.

With that said, you probably will quickly tire of having to reconfigure certain aspects every time you reinstall. Thus, a separate /home partition helps you avoid a lot of that repetition. If you are going to experiment a lot with kernels, then a separate /boot partition helps (although you also have to make backups of the kernel modules too). If you start writing a lot of scripts that you want to preserve and you store them in /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/sbin, then consider a separate partition for those file systems. If you are going to experiment a lot with third party applications, a separate /opt partition probably will help. As you become more experienced you probably will want to preserve certain configuration files from /etc and a straightforward backup routine will help you with that.

As already mentioned, partitioning is one of those topics that if you ask 10 people for an opinion you likely will receive 12 answers! This is simply one of those topics that you will learn only so much from others and eventually you have to feel your way to your own comfort zone.