Partition Info
 

mount point type size
/ ext2 800 MB
/usr ext2 5000 MB
/usr/local ext2 3000 MB
/home ext2 5200 MB
swap swap 1000 MB

i saw this on a website, i know my linux is partitioned with

/boot
/
swap

what does adding hard drive space to /usr do?
lets say i partition 10gb to / wouldn't /usr be entitled to using it?
so adding 5gb to /usr gives that particular directory 5 more gigs of space only usable in the folder?

Your partitioning is fine. And is ideal for a newbie or SOHO system.

The problem with mounting directories on dedicated partitions is that if your needs change it is far harder to change the partition size rather than if you had just put the whole file system on one partition.

On the other hand, dedicated partitions for certain file systems can make backing up easier. For example, you might want to backup /var and /home quite frequently as they are likely to change often.

Similarly, you might want to put /usr/local on a separate system and back it up reasonably often because it contains sotware that does not form a standard part of a distribution.

Some people might decide to put /usr on a separate partition and never back it up because they reckon they can install all the software from scratch easily if something goes wrong.

It can also be a good idea to put data that is updated often onto different partitions that are rarely updated because the more writes there are to disk the higher the chance of something going wrong, so /var and /home should sometimes be on their own partition(s) and a different one from /usr or /opt.

If you are running servers different considerations apply. If I was running a news server I'd certainly put /var/spool/news on its own partition and if I was running a mail server /var/mail (or /var/spool/mail) should be on its own.

It just depends on what you want to do, but your scheme is beautiful for its simplicity. There are a few more thoughts here:

http://gnuru.org/index.pl?node_id=700

Great job explaining that. I had a rough idea of the concept but now its clear.

im not running any dedicated servers or anything but just in case lets say:

i did

/ and /usr/name

when im in linux and i save something to /usr/name such as a link or file, is it physically stored on the /usr/name partition or on the / partition?

the /boot on my partition was setup by the install cd for fedora, is there any reason /boot would need its own partition?