I am in the process of building an LFS host system. The host system is OpenSUSE 11.2. I'm installing it on a 300 GB HDD and want to dedicate 100 GB to LFS.

The partitioning in the book has me quite confused.

What has me confused the most is that after 4 partitions, the partitioner won't let me make any more partitions after sdb4.

Usually when I do a linux install I'll have only swap, /boot, and / partitions. I do want to have the partitions that the book recommends. So my question would be should I partition like I normally would, but leave the 100G unpartitioned and create /lfs/swap, /lfs/boot, etc.?

I also have no qualms about changing distros.

Hi,

you can only have 4 primary partitions. If you need more then you will have to create an extended partition with logical partitions inside.
More detailed info:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Partition/
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/fdisk_partitioning.html

Keep in mind that if at some point you want to install windows on this drive you will have to reserve one primary partition for this. AFAIK, windows can not boot from a secondary partition.

Hope this helps.