For new users, personal Debian boxes, home systems, and other single-user setups, a single / partition (plus swap) is probably the easiest, simplest way to go. The recommended partition type is ext4.

对于多用户系统或者有大量磁盘空间的系统，最好将 /var、/tmp 和 /home 分配到他们各自的分区，与 / 分区分离开来。

You might need a separate /usr/local partition if you plan to install many programs that are not part of the Debian distribution. If your machine will be a mail server, you might need to make /var/mail a separate partition. If you are setting up a server with lots of user accounts, it's generally good to have a separate, large /home partition. In general, the partitioning situation varies from computer to computer depending on its uses.

对于非常复杂的系统来，您应该阅读 Multi Disk HOWTO。其中包含了更深入的内容，对于很多 ISP 和架设服务器的用户很有用。

With respect to the issue of swap partition size, there are many views. One rule of thumb which works well is to use as much swap as you have system memory. It also shouldn't be smaller than 512MB, in most cases. Of course, there are exceptions to these rules.

As an example, an older home machine might have 512MB of RAM and a 20GB SATA drive on /dev/sda. There might be a 8GB partition for another operating system on /dev/sda1, a 512MB swap partition on /dev/sda3 and about 11.4GB on /dev/sda2 as the Linux partition.

对于不同任务需要多大的空间，安装系统完成后的情况有个概念，您或许会感兴趣知道，请查阅 第 D.2 节 “各软件集所需的磁盘空间”。