There are a couple important choices that need to be made. You need to specify the location, size, mount point, and type of file system.
First we need a /boot partition. This is where Linux images (copies of the linux system that get started on power-on) are kept. This is generally small and on our test system we choose to allocate this first with a size of 98MB. We put this first on the full hard drive and it gets the device name (/dev/hda1). We choose the label (/boot) and the ext3 filesystem.
Next we need a / partition. This is where Linux keeps everything including all of the files you normally see. This is generally large (usually a max of about 5GB but we only have a 2GB drive) and we make this second with a size of 1.7GB. We put this second on the full hard drive and it gets the device name (/dev/hda2). We choose the label (/) and the ext3 filesystem.
Normally the next partition would be /home. User directories are traditionally kept under /home and installations of Linux will not normally change or format this area. If you use /home it is possible to upgrade or even change Linux distributions and have user data survive the complete change. Due to a lack of hard drive space we skip this for demonstration purposes.
Next we need to allocate swap space. This is where the operating system will find space to ``page'' running programs. It is temporary space managed by the operating system so it can load and run more programs than will fit in main memory. We generally allocate swap space to be twice the size of main memory. In this case we choose a size of 169MB. We put this third on the full hard drive and it gets the device name (/dev/hda3). We don't need to label this space and it has a ``swap'' file format.