OK, now it makes a bit more sense
How big is the hard drive? You can just dump everything in one partition but there are advantages to separate partitions, depending how much room you have available. I'd recommend having /boot /usr and /home on their own partitions.
If you're going to be using Debian/testing it includes Gnome2 (2.4 to be precise), but for stable you'll need one of the backports. I wouldn't bother with stable for what you're going to be doing. If you tell me how big your drive is I can give you my thoughts on partitioning and installation, though other people will probably have other ideas.
~~~
Steve