I get tired of reading about how it's a good idea to setup your hard drive partitions in in a myriad of different ways. Everyone seems to have an opinion on the matter. What's even worse, depending on who you talk to, everyone has a different idea on the swap partition. In these days of cheap arrays and redundant hard drives, I don't see a reason to be creating all those partitions. You lose a hard drive, you plug another one back in. That way, you don't have to worry about leaving enough room for the /usr partition, or the /var partition and then a couple of years down the road finding out that you really didn't make the partition big enough and now you are screwed. A lot of these ideas are driven by old school hard core linux people, who besides their inability to communicate effectively with other non-linux people will never admit that their ways are flawed. I've been messing with linux for a little over a year, and getting help from linux "experts" is almost like pulling teeth. I really like it when I get comments like "RTFM newbie!" . A lot of the documentation is vague if not downright cryptic. It's getting better though, and those days are coming to an end. If linux is going to survive, these old ideas and the old linux people need to wake up and get with the program!