I'm trying to find an effective scheme given 103GB to work with. I figure I need 3gb for swap, so that takes care of the odd 3. My ideal setup is to have a root partition that can easily be formatted/upgraded whenever, a partition for installs, and a partition for files. What would you all recommend?

I've read a lot of posts that advocate separate partitions for /home, and some others. You might be able to find some here with a search. I personally just don't bother. I figure if I've borked a system badly enough I need to reinstall, no sense trying to save my home folder. Second, I never upgrade, I keep very up to date backups, and simply do clean installs. My upgrade experience has never went very well, so I just avoid it.

Second... Depending on the amount of Ram you have, while a swap partition is good, its probably not 100% necessary. Swap is really for an old PC with limited ram, etc. I'm guessing with a HD that size, you probably have enough Ram to not worry much about swap.

IGF

Yep, probably right then. Awesome, free 3gb then. Thanks

If you are going to hibernate your PC, have a swap partition, its where its held for the next bootup. I often see my swap partition getting used up when mucking about with video files and the like.

On my desktop (debian) I have the following partitions that have worked for me for the last 3-4 years (from my memory as I can't be bothered walking over to switch it on).

/boot - 250MB
/ - 5GB
/usr - 10GB
/usr/local - 10GB
/var - 10GB
/swap - 2GB
/data - 40GB (General shared data stuff)
/mp3 - 40GB (I like to listen to music)
/home - 40GB

If you will install more than one distro, sharing the /home partition would not be a problem as long as you use unique usernames. You can even use the same username, but add something to the name of your home directory when you create the user.

For example, if you install Fedora, and use the username "blacksheep", you could use "/home/blacksheep-fc" as your home directory. When installing SuSE, use the same user name but use "/home/blacksheep-suse". These two installations use different GID number ranges for regular users (see /etc/login.defs) by default. If you want to access the same files and directories regardless of which distro you booted to, then you may want to preplan the regular UID range before installing. It is common to be able to enter a custom UID and GID when adding a new user.
If you share the /home partition, make sure that you don't reformat it during the installation. Just edit it to create a mount point and /etc/fstab entry.

Sharing the same user home directory may not be a good idea. The ~/.kde/ or ~/.gnome2/ directories will contain items such as menu's customized for the respective distro's.

You can share the swap partition of course. The installation of the 2nd Distro will probably notice the swap partition and ask if you want to use it.

Use the /boot/grub/menu.lst configuration of the first distro to boot the others. Don't update the MBR when installing or updating one of the other distro's. You don't want to get into a dueling distros situation where the next distro you install updates the MBR and you can't boot into the first distro. Make sure you make a backup of the MBR before installing another distro. ( See the entry for the "dd" command on this site's wiki if you don't know how ).

Also, after the first distro is installed, run "sudo /sbin/fdisk -l >partinfo.txt" to print out information you can use recreate the old partitioning scheme if you have an accident later on that wipes out the partition table from the MBR. (note: the name of the partinfo.txt file is arbitrary. I just made up the name.) Save it somewhere such as a usb pendrive or a floppy. Printing it out would also be a good idea, as well as backing up the /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

If you have a separate /tmp partition, you could try sharing that as well. Configure the systems to clear it out during a reboot. ( I don't know if they delete everything there when shutting down, or when booting back up ). You could then make it a little bit larger than you normally would have it. This would allow using it when burning a CD or DVD. Also, if /tmp is on its own partition, you can use the noexec boot option which is recommended for globally writable partitions.

Don't bother with separate partitions for /boot, /usr, /var, etc, because it can become a real PITA when you wanna switch/upgrade distros.

What I would do:

1 x 3 gig swap partition

3 x 15 gig partitions (for up to 3 distros)

1 x Whatever's left for /home

This way, you can multi-boot distros and have them all sharing the /home partition.

Instead of 3 x 15 gig partitions, you might make them 20 or 25 gig, but I've yet to see a distro which needs more than 12 gigs. Most of them don't even use 5 gigs.

Using this scheme, you can "upgrade" without touching (and possibly ruining) an existing installation.

Given that I plan to install 20-30 programs, and games such as UT2K4, would it be advisable to set aside 40gb for the / partition and the remainder for the /home partition?

Figured I'd post again since it was assumed that this question was resolved. Should I set aside 40gb for / partition?

Try experimentation, it took me a few years to work out what I am happy with. You can always back the data up and repartition if your not happy.

I have something like:
10GB /root
20GB /home
40GB /media/temp
60GB /media/movies

Basically, 10GB is way more than enough for /root and if you keep most of the big stuff, i.e. movies and music on a different partition, /home doesn't need to be that big either.

If you plan to multi-boot different distros, then don't have a common /home partition. As jschiwal pointed out, you will have problems with the common .gnome2, etc.

What I recommend is to have a single swap partition, a / partition for each distro and then a /data partition for your documents. This way, each distro has its own /home as part of /, and then you create a symbolic link to /data in your home directory. Obviously, you need to make sure the UID's are the same to share documents.

See my thoughts on multi-booting Here. I also go into a good setup of GRUB so that each distro is independent of all the others.

I hope this helps
--Ian