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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.