I'm just a little confused. I have a 320GB HDD on my laptop (about 298GB available) and I'm freshly installing openSUSE 11.2. I usually do default but this time I want to change it a little. I want a 4GB Swap, 20GB root, and remainder /home... but im not sure what order to partition the hdd in and whether to make each one primary or extended?

You can have up to 4 primary partitions. So if you have a Windows install, that has to be primary. Then you can make the others also primary if you never want to divide it up again. I would put swap at the end because it is easy to delete and recreate if you need to make it an extended partition for some reason.

Its just going to be one distro of linux on here. Should I make a 20GB primary of / , about 270GB primary of /home , and a small Swap at primary?

I'm just not really sure what the extended is I guess.

Basically there's an old archaic reason that only allows 4 primary partitions. So in order to have more than that, some clever guys came up with the idea to use "extended" partitions that allowed up to some huge number of total partitions (which has since been shrunk to 15 partitions max last I heard). Some operating systems (i.e. Windows up until XP, I believe) would not allow you to install to extended partitions.

You can read more about it here.

Also, I googled around a bit and it appears the 15 partition limit on linux is a function of the way the libATA kernel driver is implemented. Apparently scsi drives can only hold 15 partitions. Since the kernel developers decided that all drives should be handled by libata, all drives now have this limit unless you go back and reompile your kernel. Then you can exceed it on IDE hard disks.

Why there are extended...

You might first use a linux live-cd to open a terminal and with root privileges type the command "fdisk -l".

This will read the partition tables and perhaps show you that if Windows is installed, there is a hidden Windows rescue partition as well as the Windows OS partition. Two of the primary partition will have been used.

If this is the case, when you install linux, use the openSUSE partitioning tool to create an extended partition. You may have swap, root, and home as logical partitions as well as whatever others you need within the extended partition.

You will have to create the partition yourself, but it is not difficult. Remember that you can perform all the act of installation including partitioning without making any changes before a warning that the installation process is about to begin. You can explore and fumble without doing any harm.

If you have Vista and want to shrink its partition, do so with the Vista partitioning tool or as a consequence, Vista will not boot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning