what are the basic partitions requires while installing ubuntu?

Depends, you can use 1 partition.
However it's a good idea to make a separate partition for /home

Kind regards

You should at least go with 2 partitions, one for swap and one for the system. Making a separate /home partition is a good idea, but not essential. I would give at least 15 GB to the system partition.

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It would be helpful to have a little more information.

Is this going to be the only OS on the box?

If not, is it going to be the primary OS that you are going to be using?

What size is the drive that it is going to be on?

How much free space is on that drive?

Separate partitions for / (root) and /home are a very good idea. You should have a /swap that is equal to the size of your ram.

Your / partition should be at around 10Gb (mine is over 30 because I add a lot of programs).

Your /home partition should be big enough for all your data.

If you install on just one partition and just want to play with Ubuntu, then a 15Gb install is big enough for the whole thing. Heck, you could do it on 8Gb.

Actually, having SWAP double the size of your ram is better, especially if you don't have very much RAM to begin with.

I have always followed an approach like this for my home PCs.

sda1 - / 10 GB formatted as ext3
sda2 - /home 10 GB formatted as ext3
sda3 - (about = RAM) swap although with 8 GB of RAM I don't really need swap
sda4 - /data (all the rest of the drive) formatted ext4

And the reasons for my madness

I like to be able do do a cold backup of the OS. I use g4l (the program formerly known as Ghost for Linux). So I keep the OS partition reasonably small. I use ext3 because g4l does not support ext4 at the moment.

I also do a monthly cold backup of /home. I don't store data there if I can avoid it so a small home is fine.

/data is where I store my DATA. The important stuff ranging from email to OpenOffice.org documents, databases, etc. etc. etc. This I hot backup nightly with a script to a second hard drive. For really critical data I maintain a 7 day rolling backup. For other thing such as downloaded bank statements and items which can be downloaded or created again I maintain a single backup on the second drive. I backup selected subdirectories from /data to CD or DVD monthly.

Bottom line - I design my system layout to facilitate backup and recovery.

Ken

Hi,

I'll expand a bit. If you have a small memory footprint then use the 2xRAM. If not then for larger foot prints set to a size that meets the system setup & usage. Obviously if you have 2GB and do a lot of image processing or image editing then adjust of 2XRAM might be feasible. But if a normal use desktop and you have the space then setting 2xRAM will do no harm. But if you do not have the swap allocated and the system needs to page then you will pay the price.

True. Unfortunately, I DO do a lot of image processing. Haha. Also, if you have a LOT of RAM, you can always make part of that into /tmp/. It's only multitudes faster and such.