Partitions required for Installing Ubuntu?

If you are new to Ubuntu - don't bother. Just leave some unallocated, unpartitioned space to the Ubuntu, and installer will ask what you want to achieve:

Advanced partitioning is an option only if you know what you're doing. For example, having or not having swap partition, isolating home partition, can give some benefits, but for Linux newbies this is totally useless :)

Two partitions are enough for the installation, one will be the / partition which will also be the mounting point and the second will be a small partition the swap.

The mounting point / is to Ubuntu and rest similar operating systems like the C:\ disk for Windows, that is all system files go there. for further details of partitioning you can check dual boot partitions

The swap is used when the physical memory of the system (RAM) is full. There are further technical explanations for the swap space but i think they will not help you at the current task.

Usually if there is enough disk space, the size of the swap partition is recommended to be equal to the size of the RAM, i.e for a system with 1 GB RAM, 1 GB of swap is ok. For details about swap you can check the swap faq

lastly one good guide with screenshots can be found here: How to install Windows 7 and Ubuntu side by side which claims to be up to date with Windows 8.

So what should I do now?

Stick a live cd in your cd player and reboot. Let it boot the cd and you will get a prompt asking to install Ubuntu.

In how many partitions should I divide that space & what conventions should be followed. Should I do this in the Ubuntu installer or should I do all this before installing Ubuntu?

• Use the installer, and when it comes to partitioning choose the bottom one (the image will look different when you have another OS but it will still be the bottom one):

• You need at least 1 partition and it has to be named /. Format it as ext4. 20 or 25Gb is more than enough if you use another partition for home and/or data.
• You can also create a swap. Between 2 and 4 Gb is enough for newer system.
• You can create other partitions for /home or /boot but that is not required. Format it as ext4

Lots of people have lots of ideas when it comes to partitioning.

The exact steps are shown in this (official) how to:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/help/install-desktop-latest