Hello, I've been playing with linux a bit for the past few months; wanting to set up a Web/mail/ Online Text games known as Mu* Moo, Muck, Mush if you don't already know. What I Need to know before hand is, If something goes wrong with the Linux OS which i wouldn't understand how to fix, what partition do I format. Also how should I partition the mount points. I used to just have.

/ 17490mb
<swap> 2047mb

Obviously that's not what it should be setup like.. What I need to know is. How much do I need to reserve for the /, the swap, and what other partitions should I set up to accomidate my needs. How should I setup
/home
/usr
/var
and all that crap. I have a 20 gig drive. and 256 mbs of ram.

I'll be having user accounts, with a limit of 50mb's per user. If something goes wrong, I don't want to lose their data if I need to reinstall Redhat. I hope I was clear enough for you to understand.. Thanks :/

Whoa! Easy on the 's, please! That nearly gave me a headache!

Anyway, the partitioning of your harddisk is really down to a matter of personal preference, and what you intend to be doing with the system.

You have a 20Gb harddisk, so presumable you're using a fairly new (past couple of years) computer. Do you really need to dedicate 2Gb as Swap? Most places will say 'Your SWAP should be approx. 2x the size of your physical RAM'. This harks back to the days when a machine would have 4Mb or RAM, if you're running a halfway decent machine, you should not need 2Gb of SWAP.

For my main Linux setup (which, I must stress, I only use as a desktop machine):

/boot = 5Mb (smallest I could do)
/ = 1Gb
/home = 1Gb
/root = 1Gb
/usr = 8Gb
SWAP = 512MB

I also have RH & Slack running on a solo / partitions of 6Gb each.