Man you had to ask days after slashdot has a good article on partitioning.
Well I can't find it for the life of me, so I'm going to try to give you the <a href=http://www.linuxnewbie.org/>NHF</a> version.
Most of the time if you aren't going to use the machine for much more than a glorified packet sniffer (read=ShowEq) you can go with option 1), let it do it for you.
This will NOT give you an optimized solution, but it will more than likely WORK.
A more optimized solution depends heavily on the size of your disk and what you intend to run.
If you choose to do it yourself, using Disk Druid ( Don't use fdisk, not because it's bad, because you won't like it. Trust me)
You want your partitions to look like this:
Swap partition first (Use recommended size for this)
/var second Use about 10-20% of your disk, aim for about a gig if you can
-- This is where your logs will go. You don't want this with your main sections, because if this fills up and it happens to be on the same partition as / or /usr, programs will lock trying to write to disk and you are fubar.
You want this RIGHT NEXT to your swap partition, because swap and /var are the most used parts of the disk. Any time spent traveling between them is lost time.
/ third Decide whether you want to install root based programs or user based programs now. Adjust size bigger the more you plan to install programs as root.
/usr fourth, make roughly the same size as /, adjusting bigger the more you plan to do as a user
/home fifth, think about how many users you will have, and how much space you want to give them each.
Whatever space you have left, split between / and /usr
For future record, this helpfile will give hardcore Linux guru's a heart attack. How crude his distinctions are between what each section does! How carelessly he generalizes!
Yeah so? These suggestions may not always be right, but they are the way to bet.