Partitioning during install
 

Greetings Yoper Community.

I am about as new as you can be to Yoper, and still fairly new to linux. I'm still trying to find my distribution of linux. I've tried Mandrake, Fedora, Red Hat and openBSD. I had a friend do the install of openBSD cause I couldn't figure that one out either.

I was reading things about Yoper at www.linuxbeta.com and it seemed like it was quite nice and fairly quick. Sounds appealing to me. Appears to have the best things of a few different linux distros. I like that idea. So this brings me to downloading the ISO and burning it to a CD. Installing on my celeron 800mhz Thinkpad. And I come to the GUI Partition tool.

At first it comes up with 3 partitions. Please help:

1.] Someone tell me why Linux has more than 1 partition?
2.] Does it have too? Could it have more? Could it have less?
3.] What do I need to do to pass the step of partition and then to installing?
4.] Describe to me the different File Systems, and why I should use either or

If anyone could kindly help me with those 3 questions, that would be very helpful. Thank you very much guys and I look forward to getting to know the community.

The usual set up has 3 partitons:
/boot
/root "/"
/swap

You /boot & /swap hold everything you need to boot and HD room to make up for ram you don't have.
If you have the room I strongly suggest having a /home as well. Having /home as a partition rather than just a directory is great because
A: If dualbooting you can share all (or most) of you installed software (provided thats were you installed.
B: If you ever had to re-install your distro all your software and personal stuff would remain.
C: If your still checking out many distros you don't have to keep loosing everything you did.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.

Ahh, turns out my ISO file I downloaded was corrupt. So to anyone else having similar problems like I had, try redownloading your ISO file, or try a different (maybe higher quality if possible) blank CD. Thats what fixed my problem. w00t.