My Proposed Partitioning Scheme
Lately I've been thinking of redoing my partitioning scheme. Currently I'm using an LVM-root setup, which has caused me some difficulty. I have been unable to upgrade to the new 2.6 kernel because I can't seem to build a kernel and initrd that support the version of LVM I'm using (can't find the correct version of vgscan). My solution is to move the root partition out of LVM, since I'm never going to resize it anyway. Also, this eliminates the need for an initrd and a seperate /boot partition. In addition, if the LVM partition gets hosed, I have a basic system I can use to fix it.
Here's my planned setup. This will be used on two drives, one 200GB and one 40GB (my laptop). The /var partition is larger because that's where my Apt cache is, and I need it for package downloads. 2.0GB is plenty for me for /usr because I don't install much under /usr/local (Debian has everything packaged already :-), I don't install packages I don't need, and I do my kernel builds under $HOME. /home usually fills the remainder of the disk (or physical volume) unless the disk is huge. I don't think I'll ever exceed 40GB for personal files, but I can always resize /home if I need to.
/dev/hda1 / ext3 150MB /dev/vg01/usr /usr ext3 2.0GB /dev/vg01/tmp /tmp ext3 1.0GB /dev/vg01/var /var ext3 1.0GB /dev/vg01/swap swap ext3 1.0GB /dev/vg01/home /home ext3 between 10GB and 40GB