I'm pretty new to Linux and am looking for thoughts on partitions;
which to have and what sizes.

The machine in question will have two relatively large SCSI disks
(Hardware RAID not available), will be dedicated exclusively to Linux
and will have no more than 3 users (excl Root). This is a "home"
system, i.e. no server functionality like web services, mail etc will
be set up. Obviously TCP/IP (PPP) to speak to the external world.

The two primary things I plan on using it for is Video Editing and
playing around with Kernel compilations.

I plan on setting up a dual Linux boot, i.e. a vanilla distro (Suse
8.2) and my dev/play Linux boot.

I'd like to split out /, /usr, /home, /var and swap.

My thoughts being something along these lines:

A 256MB partition at the start of each disk for each of the / folders
(Dual Linux boot assuming one will include the MBR)

Followed by a 256MB partition on each disk for the swap setup to run
in parallel. (System has 256MB RAM)

Then /usr, /home & /var on separate partitions with ? Sizes. ... don't
really know which sizes to set here. Also would like to share these
between to two Linux versions but not sure how to go about it or even
if it is practical. Will also need a DVD/CD image partition.

Finally I plan on combining all the remaining disk space on the two
drives into a RAID 0 config for storing and manipulating the raw video
data. This data will be transient so "no" worries about reliability.

Thoughts very much appreciated

Thanks
Leon