/root partition, how big?

Do you mean / or /root?

/ will need a fair bit, most stuff installs to /usr but some stuff goes in /opt, which often falls under /.

I highly recommend you use ext3 and LVM, then you can live resize partitions to balance this later.
 
doesn't anyone partition out stuff no more?

My boxes usually have /home /usr /var /opt /boot on separate partitions at least? In this case / doesn't need to be that big... most of the stuff is in /usr and /usr/local/ It's a no brainer to have /home on it's own partition.
 
Stevens top suggestion is to make sure that /boot is a good half a gig at least. I had massive issues with my 8.10 box when it came to a 9.04 onine update because my Boot partition had filled up and had no space for the boot image.

Muchos distatrous tinkering later, a PXE boot to a live CD and a partition resize sorted it. Oopsy!

I try to seperate out as much as possible, but when I tried to initially set up my multiboot system, I found that Windows doesn't seem to keen on more than about six partitions [or is this a hardware thing?] so watch out on that...
 
Stevens top suggestion is to make sure that /boot is a good half a gig at least.

woah ! half-a-gig? That's a bit excesive, most distros will do 50 or 100MB, 150MB at the most... half a gig is bigger than most peoples whole hard drives at one time.

How much of your 500Meg are you using just now?

If you make it too big it may not even boot in certain situations, and always put it at the start of the disk.
 
Yeah, no need for /boot to be that big, unless you really like your kernels! Most versions of GRUB won't boot off a partition >4GB (may be fixed in the newest releases).

Generally I'll go for 100MB /boot, double the RAM as swap (max 4GB) and the rest as /, sometimes with / as 20GB and /var as the rest, depending on server function. For workstations there's probably some mileage in having /home separate too.
 
I forget to mention, I'll usually make a /boot and a /boot2 this allows reshuffling/recovery incase of kernel mess ups/ etc simply by repointing/copying the directory.... (after install, copy the contents of /boot to /boot2, obviously....)
 
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