hey guys... what part.'s and sizes do i have to make?

1) / ?

2) ext 3 ?

3) 512 mb swap ?

Heh, in my opinion, you shouldn't try Gentoo so early..
Should maybe try Debian first. (I believe Debian is closest distro to Gentoo?)

Now about your question.
I would create a boot partition (Usually about 250mb, well depending on your hard drive size really..)
Then create a /home/ partition (You should make this about 10gb [Again depending on HDD Size..] This is essential for non-BSD Porting distros, as it means you don't have to delete your /home/ directory when you upgrade kernel, unless there's a way to upgrade, that I am unfamiliar with?)
Possibly a /media/ partition where you store everything like mp3s, oggs and whatever other media files you use. (Maybe make it also about 10gb [Again depends on your HDD])
Create a partition for / (Just put whatever's remaining in here, as long as there's at least 4gbs here it should be ok, I would usually aim for about 10gbs at least though..)
And finally create a swap partition (This is when your computer has used all it's RAM, it trades RAM for swap drive space? I'm not really sure about this..)
For swap partition you have 512mg RAM? I don't think you'd need anything more than say 512mb HDD.

(This is based on a 40gb hard drive. If you have less, well obviously you will have to improvise.)
Hope this helps.

Oh about your ext 3 question.
I dunno, I always use ext 3.
And then choose the 1024 block check (It takes the longest, but it does it job, and if you're anything like me, you have the time.)

i dont see that option for /boot part.. i see a "/" im installing redhat on my 2nd part. after xp.. and i cant use auto part. i have to manually do it and im only using 10 gigs..

should i just make a
1) / =boot ? what size?
2)/home ? =8 gigs
3)swap 500 mbs?

The /boot doesn't exist, you have to "flag" a partition as boot (Don't know if you're using fdisk for partitioning?)

You just create one primary partition, say 250mb, then find the options and tag it as boot. (I believe this is #83?)
You create another primary partition, say 4gb, this will be your /home/ partition. (You have to tag this as #83?)
Create another primary partition, say 6gb, this will be your / partition (You tag this as #83 also?)
Then finally create another partition (I'm not sure, maybe make this one secondary?) at size 512mb (You tag this as #82?)

Then after that write the partition table, then when setting it up, choose ext 3 and 1024 block checks

I hope I got it right.

noo... i just manualy do the part. with the redhat cd... it gives me some otions to make diff part.'s

i see
/
/home
/ext3
/root
and others...

im not sure which to chose.. i have no clue of any #83's or anything

i just made a 250 mb / for boot
/home with 8 gigs for hd size
and a 512 /swap at the end but it didnt work

Well unfortunately I can't help.
The second partition style I showed you is the same partition table I set up on my computer, using fdisk Partitioning. (I have a 12gb Hard drive :P)

Of course I used the Slackware setup
I could *try* and set up a RedHat installation and see what I can do, but I'm pretty sure I would use fdisk, if you can use fdisk (There's a graphical version of fdisk I believe, I wasn't very fond of it, so I just chose fdisk..) use it, as the stye I mentioned was for use with fdisk,

bah.... thanks thogh

Hi,
Here's my suggestion. Manually partition with Disk Druid.
Create partitions:
/boot
/
/home
/var
/tmp
/swap

For the /boot partition, a 100 MB will do.
For / partition, set it up to about 7 GB
For /home, about 1 GB
For /var, about 1 GB
For /swap, 512 MB
Leave the rest to /tmp

The /home partition actually depends on your usage. I am a single-user and don't download/save much stuff. If you do save plenty of stuff, then reduce your / partition to 6 GB and increase your /home partition.
For the /var partition, the minimum is about 400 MB. So you can adjust around if you feel some partition sizes are less.
I used ext3fs for all.
Hope it helps.

Just on the swap partition. From what i understand, is that it should be twice the size of your ram.

eg...

Ram = 128MB
Swap = 256MB

IMHO Arenba shows a better partition layout, but I think the values could be tweaked a bit more, besides I like to split up some because then it's easier to work with quota and adds a layer of protection to the system. It then looks like this:

/boot: min 50MB. Only holds kernels and system.maps and GRUB if you use it.
/: 500MB max if you split off /usr. Holds only /etc, /dev, /proc, /root, /bin, /sbin, /lib.
/usr: min 2, 4GB for installing aprox half of the packages, depending on what you install. You could also mount --bind /opt in this tree.
/home: min 1GB. You'll accumulate lotsa stuff here.
/var: min 1GB. Lotsa logs, the rpm database, mail spool, etc etc.
/tmp: min 500MB.
/swap: half your mem or 1 time your mem. If you tweak your VM sysctl's and have >= 256MB RAM you won't see much usage unless you have apps with exceptional memory requirements.

Some notes:
1. Do NOT install what you don't need NOW: that's a good rule of thumb to curb vulnerability risks.
2. Please take some time and harden your box.
3. When you're done and your system is "stabilised", you can "mount /<partition> -o remount,ro" which protects the system against deleting stuff in /<partition>. Not all can be ro, /boot and /usr can. In addition /boot and /var can have the "nosuid,noexec,nodev" mount flags, /tmp can have "nosuid,nodev". You can set /tmp to have "noexec", but that will break script stuff from like "mc" (Midnight commander) or stop UPX-compressed binaries from running. Of course you have to reset mount flags before installing/removing stuff.
4. Since you'll be running ext3, you can protect crucial binaries (/sbin, /bin) and configs (/etc) with "chattr -R =i /<dir>" which makes them unchangable (immutable).
5. Add a "blank" unmounted partition. Always comes in handy as spill disk, or for /media, like Chu already suggested.

That's a lot of partitions.

Can't he just do a

/
swap
/home

Why all the extra partitions? /tmp and all the others will fall into / anyway. So just make / that much bigger. Am I missing something?

I agree, for a beginner anyway, and for a desktop system, there is no need for multiple partitions. Basically you only need / (the root filesystem) and swap. With your configuration a swap partition of about 250MB will do (the old rule of swap = 2 * RAM no longer applies), although you could make it bigger (up to 2GB actually) if there would be need for memory-hungry apps.

To have your /home partition separately could be useful for keeping your files when you change distro. To move other things to separate partitions is only really necessary for servers, or if you are very concerned about security.

You could also make a separate partition for storing data to be used by & exchanged with Windows if you dual-boot. This partition should be of type FAT32 then (Windows can't read Linux filesystems and Linux' support of NTFS write is still shaky).

About filesystem type I would recommend ReiserFS, which is very good with small files, although there is nothing serious against ext3, which is fine as well.

I disagree with the advice not to try Gentoo early. Gentoo is a very fine distro and has very good documentation, as well as a lively community to help you out. It's just that you shouldn't be afraid to work on the commandline and to learn a few things.

is gentoo easy like redhat?
or is it harder?

your right.. i dont want or need all those partitions.. thats why i was asking about the /, /home and /swap partitions...

so i should make the
/ = 250 mbs
/home = 9 gigs
and /swap 512 or 256 mb's ?

Disclaimer: New with very little experience. The following assumes a clean drive.
I havn't tried a dual boot setup yet.

I just set up RH9.
I used the "Disk Druid" on the install disk.
On a 128 ram / 20 GB HD machine I used:

/boot - ext3 - fixed size - 100mb
swap - fixed size - 256mb
/ - ext3 - fill up to - 9000mb

or if you don't need space for a second future OS

/ - ext 3 - fill to maximum size

I found disk druid actually set me up with something like 102 / 259 / 8996 in the partitions. Disk druid may swap around the order of the partitions in order to reduce
wasted space but it wont hurt anything.

BTW I don't know how much space your setup will require but with
a 1.6 GB install I only ended up with 9.1mb in that 100mb /boot partition.
Why is 100mb the usual boot partition size?

Nope. You are not missing anything. You can do it that way if you want to. The reason why I keep the /var partition is that it stores my log files (among other things). So, supposing my / partition goes bad and the only remedy happens to be to format and reinstall the whole damn thing, then I wouldn't format my /var (and of course, /home) partitions coz' I would like to find out what went wrong. At least, that's how I reasoned. Linux has so far, not gone down on me, so I didn't have the chance to check it out.
As for the /tmp file, I keep it around just for the heck of it.
Actually, I wanted to see what's going on in there. It can be in the main partition too.