You'll need swap if your system lacks enough memory (<128 Mb) and you want to run lots of apps at the same time. As for /usr, /var etc. You would want to create separate parttions if for some reason your system is going down, but here is a bottleneck, most of the system utilities are located in /usr/bin or /usr/local so in a case of hard crash these will be affected and you'd want to reformat it, you'd definetely won't want to create a sseparate partition for /etc (this is where almost all configs are, if it fails to mount you're in deep). You, I think, should create a separate partition for /home, so in a case of re-inetall, you'll have all your personal data untouched (just define a mount point during re-install and don't fomat it). And definetely you must crreate a separate partition for / - it is a requirement. So as for root, if it's not ext2 then during boot up it becomes virtual file system partition, and then you apply journaling to it. I can't tell you wich one is better ext3 or reiserfs, but reiser tends to be faster.
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