how should I partition a 514 MB HD? that's one of the things I hate the most about *nix  =( partitioning!
***************************************************

That is a good question.  There are a few theories on how to do this.  If this will only be a single user system for you to play/learn then you can get away with / and swap.  

Typically make swap the same size as you RAM and no more than twice your RAM.  You can use less swap if you will not be doing anything memory intensive, but some systems won't run without a swap.  

If the system is going to be a server for anything then you should break out /var.  Things like mail (/var/spool/mail), print server (/var/spool/lpd), logs (/var/logs), http (/var/www/htdocs), etc.  The reason you want to break this out is so /var doesn't fill up you / partition.  It is possible that your system could get so many error messages (someone trying to port scan) or so much mail from an overly active list or printing a 5,000,000 page document that /var would comsune your entire harddrive.  When / runs out of space all kinds of wierd things can happen from not being able to log in, the system crashing.  If you don't have a high traffic server you won't need much space for /var (I have 32MB on my sparc5 for logs, mail, and web and it stays 50%).  If my 32MB /var fills up oh well, I just get more errors that the system can't write and I have to delete some stuff, but my / is safe.

Other partitions that could be useful to have are /usr and /opt and /usr/home.  /usr is where most of you programs are stored (unless you are on an old style system like Solaris or Suse who use /opt for optional software).  /usr/home (or the like) is where your users keep their personal files.  If you have a lot of users and don't use quotas bob could try and download the latest .iso images for his five favorite distributions onto your 500MB harddrive.  Again this would fill your / and bad things happen.

What I typically do for my home systems is just / and swap (my girlfriend is a *nix geek too).  On my home severs I create /, /var, and swap.  Productions servers in a data center really require you to look at what they will be used for and partition them out for their specific job.

Dusty