Hey guys! I bought a 40GB IDE drive to use for Linux on my system. The first 2GB are going to a swap partition for XP so that leaves 38GB.

Now, I'm gonna add another 2GB Linux Swap partition at the front of the drive.

Beyond that, can/should I just leave the remaining 36GB all for Linux or should I break them down into different partitions? What is the possible advantage of that?

And also, should I use ext3 or reiserFS? Thanks guys!

Breaking them down helps when backing up certain partitions, but 1 large paritition helps for extremely large files, such as raw video if you do that thing. It's up to you really, do whatever fits your needs.

If it's not going to be your /boot or / partition, you can give a go at whatever you'd like, I've found a very slight performance gain with ReiserFS, but at a cost of not being compatible on all systems should you decide to move the drive to something that only supports ext2/3 out of the box.

Cool

Sweet. Thanks dude!

Lastly, can I use reiserFS for my full Linux partition? IE. do I have to have any ext3 partition or not?

I hate having multiple partitions for no reason and I'm gonna probably be constantly uninstalling and reinstalling different distros on this drive so I'm gonna go with 1 big one.

Actually most people who constantly uninstall/install distros tend to believe in having multiple partitions to ease data backup and things like that. It's also possible to share something like a boot partition so that you can have multiple distros on the same machine at once.

As for ReiserFS for everything, yes, but at a cost. You have to do things a bit different at times, like setting up the /boot partition to be mount with the -o notail option. Here's an exerpt on ReiserFS from the Gentoo docs, though it applies elsewhere as well:
So, no, you don't HAVE to have both, but it does make things easier to have the /boot partition at least be ext3.

HTH

Cool