That struck me as a little odd too. If anything, when I started with
Slack (8.1) I had more partitions that I needed (/, /boot, /home, /var,
/opt, /usr, /usr/local). I don't think I've ever installed it on a HD
with less than four partitions (/, /home, /usr/local and swp) and the
install has done nothing but fly every time. On my desktop machine now
it takes around 15 mins from putting the CD in to rebooting. OK, I do
have a Barracuda 7200.8 now, but still it seems odd he had this trouble.