I agree with most of the advice given in this thread:
For the record(tm), mine stands differently. One (data, type 0x83) partition in general. Exceptions below.
/boot - Maybe
/boot - only if required (in certain cases with SPARC TILO for example)
/home - definitely
/home - more or less a user preference, I don't unless there is a 2nd disk. I never had to repartition because of disk shortage. And in case you need a reinstall (you don't, linux is not windows), boot into a rescue shell before and erase all but /home. Simple.
/usr/local - yes, if you install software other than via RPM /var - sometimes. /var contains log files, spools, print queues and many other files of a volatile nature. In business Unix environments, this is frequently separate for backup reasons and because certain DOS attacks can fill up this directory. Probably not necessary for you. /tmp - some people make /tmp separate because it contains mostly temp files, and you may want to allocate a small root partition.
/tmp - on diskless-ful clients (Windows machines, Hard Drive, but Linux over Network) this one should on-disk, to not congest the network with tmp traffic. Though, if you have a fast server, it could outperform the local disk. Therefore, such a disklessful client looks like /dev/hda1 - swap /dev/hda2 - tmp /dev/hda3 - ntfs/vfat making it the only partition again (see above :-)
/usr - I rarely do this even in business since it is not very volatile. Historically, it was mountable because of the small disks used.
Jan Engelhardt --