How large should I make root, home, and swap partitions?

You actually should just install ubuntu on two partitions, / and swap. You can have ubuntu do this automatically by choosing to use the available free space (in other words, do not format your 60GB partition in vista before installing ubuntu).

Some will argue that you should use separate partitions for /home, /boot, / and all kinds of things. This is useful in some situations, but for most common situations you are better off not doing this. This is because it will fragment your disk in a way that might not be wanted later. Just let ubuntu choose for you and you'll be safe :)

You would often use a separate home in situations where you want to use:

• Multiple drives
• Multiple mutually exclusive ubuntu installs sharing the same data (could work with varying distros but not advisable to do this with different distros)
• Situations where your data needs to be safe in the case of a drive failure/upgrade (most normal installs are safe)
• You want it to be easier to reinstall or upgrade the system (just choose not to format the /home partition - please note a backup of important data is highly recommended during any system upgrade)
• The same drive is used by different systems.
• Your disk does not have enough capacity for both home and system data (e.g. a small SSD)

NB: "Ubuntu's installer offers to preserve the contents of /home, so you don't need to be afraid to lose anything when doing re-installs or upgrades. – htorque"

On another note about swap - if you want to be sure that when doing large tasks you can have a lot of swap space, you can set your swap space to be twice the size of your ram, but either way, ubuntu will handle the requirements rather well if you choose to install on the blank 60GB partition.

You might also want to read up on Swap files instead of Swap partitions. Again this can help reduce fixed fragmentation of your disk and dynamically allocate space as you need it. Supposedly, there is no performance loss. How to increase swap space?

I have always had a separate /home partition, root (/) partition and swap. It means when I upgrade, I can do a clean install of the new OS with no risk to the old one. I just mount the home partition in the new one. Also means if I go back to the old OS, any files created in the new OS are still there.

I have used various sizes for my root partition. On one machine I have regular Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio, each installed in 10GB partitions. The regular ubuntu has used 6.04Gib and studio has used 3.08Gib.

You can always change the partition size later anyway if you need more space. Just need to boot from a live CD and use GParted to change the partitions.

As for Swap, twice the RAM or 1.5x the RAM is a good rule. Then you can hibernate if you want to. But if you find you need more or less you can repartition later.

For / (root) partition, I use 10G (of which I rarely find I've used more than 8Gb). For swap, I have 3Gb RAM, so I set 4Gb of swap. Not quite the recommended "twice your RAM", but hibernate still works, although I rarely use it. For /home, I use the rest of the hard disk.

These days, the general consensus is to just use one root partition (which includes /home) and a swap. But I still do keep a separate home partition : I think a little separation from the system drive is nice and it means that if I'm ever in the position to increase /home, I can do so more easily.

FYI My Ubuntu install with a 10GB root is now showing root as 85% full and wont allow upgrade.