I am just a newbie researching linux, and i have fedora downloaded. One question i have is how many and how big should the partitions be? I am running Windows on a single partition on a 80 GB hardrive right now.

I'm using a 5 gig partition for linux myself. Of course my hard drive is only 40 gigs so my space is slightly more limited than you . Right now I'm using just 2.3 gigs with all my media files under windows. So far it's worked out well for me, I haven't had to worry about space yet.

It all depends on how many partitions you'd like and how big would you like them. I have four partitions:
1. /
2. swap
3. /home
4. /usr
how much free space do you have in that hardrive? how much ram do you have? if you have like 500 mb or more you can omit the swap partition, but it wouldn't hurt making one. you can also only install the "/ " partition and the swap partition. You can also do a search or check the slackware forum there was a similar question there.

How much space can you spare?

How much you need depends on what you want to do. You don't know what you want to do, of course, as you are new to this, so it's a catch 22...

Some easy answers. You require a swap partition of about 500 meg. Easy one. You need a / (root or main) partition of 5-10gig depending on what you can spare. This is the simplest set up.

you could also have 500meg /swap and 5-10gig / and 2-5gig /home

The /home is where your personal data and files go. Having it separate in /home can be handy if you want to format and/or reinstall linux (in / ) and want to keep the data.

There are many other options.

Heya m0rt3r, how large do you keep your swap space out of interest?

yeah, i have about 60 gigs free and i have 512 ram. so is the one swap partition with the root partiton the easiest? i don't want to have to setup four partitions.

I have this:
40 gig HDD:
1: Windoze XP Pro (~30 gb)
2: Linux ext3 / (9.5 gb)
3: Swap (500 mb)