Well if you were to use mandrake, during the install there is an option that allows you to format all of your current partitions and it will auto allocate the partitions for you. This is your best bet. If you want to allocate the partitions yourself, there are only two partitions you truly need, root (/), and swap. For your root partition I reccommend using ext3 journalised partition. The rule of thumb for the swap partition is to make it twice the size as the amount of ram you have in your computer, however seeing as how most new computers have huge amounts of ram, I only suggest this if you are using less than 256mb of ram, otherwise make your swap partition the same size as the amount of ram you have. If you decide to seperate partitions for your user's home directory and root, I suggest you use at least 10 gigs for root (/), and everything else for /home. This is because a lot of rpm's automatically install somewhere under the root (/) directory and you dont want to run out of space for installing programs. Also if you are running a webserver, some of the paranoid people I know place their files for the webserver on a seperate partition as well. It all depends on what you are trying to do with the computer.
