Suggestions
 

Im getting a new dell laptop with a 60 Gb harddrive and i plan to partition it in half.Could anyone suggest what partiions they would think i should use for linux and what size they should be.I am going to install a full version of mandrake but i know i will still have a lot of space.
Some people for example say you need a /tmp partiton some say you dont.
What partitions do ye have and why?
Cheers

p.s. i was going to do something like this.

/boot 2000Mb
swap 1025 Mb (twice RAM)
/var 1000Mb
/ 10Gb
/home 16Gb

Total 30025 Mb

Did you mean / rather than /boot? If you make a /boot partition, I would suggest between 20 and 100 MB, depending upon how many distributions and kernels you want to play with/

For a non-server home box, I recommend:

/ - 3.5 gig
/boot - 20 - 100 MB, you can get by without it if / is ext2 or ext3 filesystem
swap - 128 MB
/home - the rest of the drive

Proper Filesystem Layout

yeah i'd go with fancypiper's suggestion. maybe a little more swap as you can so so spare it, and another 2gb on / (maybe splitting that with a /usr) other than that...