I must strongly disagree with both duelafn and rowdog about partitioning.

Well, I'll agree with you then. I was trying to think from the point of view a complete newbie and partition hell can be a real nightmare. On the other hand, a separate /home partition makes it easy to switch distros or rebuild from a failed OS upgrade. Personally, I use separate partitions for anything not handled by the package manager, but I also use LVM so it's a snap to repartition.