What partition layout would you suggest for a 60 GB harddrive?:

   /dev/hda1     3Gb     / 
   /dev/hda2     8Gb     /home
   /dev/hda3     500Mb   swap
   /dev/hda4             logical partition 
   /dev/hda5     8Gb     /usr 
   /dev/hda6     8Gb     /usr/local
   /dev/hda7     8Gb     /usr/src
   /dev/hda8     8Gb     /opt
   /dev/hda9     8Gb     /tmp
   /dev/hda10    12Gb    /var

By separating /usr/local, /usr/src and /home into their own partitions, if for some reason, you need to reinstall, for an upgrade, or to switch distributions, you can ignore those partitions during the install, and then modify /etc/fstab afterwards to add these partitions back to the system.

A process with a lot of errors, that logs to /var/log can quickly fill up a partition. If this is part of / you could potentially be locked out of the system, requiring a reinstall, or boot to an emergency boot disk, in order to repair the system.