40G is more than enough: unless you have a lot of audio or video files that'll take up the space I'd use at most 10G for your Debian installation. That way you'll have room to try out some other distributions if you want to, without messing with your main install.
/boot /usr and /home are some of the standard directories.
/boot contains boot related stuff - surprise surprise - including bootloader config info, and your actual linux kernel image[s].
/usr contains the majority of your applications. Having it on a separate partition means you can mount it read-only, less chance of accidentally borking something, or someone else intentionally doing the same.
/home is where user's home directories are located. Using a separate partition makes backups easier, plus you can use a different file system. If you're going to have lots of small files reiserfs is good, whereas for large files, like video, XFS is better.
Assuming you just use 10G of the 40 you have, I'd do something like this:
/ 2GB
/boot 80MB
/usr 2.5GB
/home 5.5GB
The installer will ask how you want to partition the drive, and let you assign the partitions to the directories, or mount points, listed above. / is the root directory btw.
There are three Debian distributions: stable testing and unstable. Gnome 2.4 is part of testing and unstable. It's not in stable but there is at least one well maintained backport that seems to install and run just fine, so no matter which version of Debian you use it certainly isn't **** to install Gnome. Anyway, hope this helps get you started.
~~~
Steve
Linear Mode
