Salix needs, at the very minimum, one partition which holds the root directory and must be assigned as “/” (without the quotation marks).

It is highly recommended to have one swap partition. If you already have another Linux OS running on your machine, its swap partition can be shared, and you do not need to create another. A swap partition size is in essence used as an extra RAM to improve the performance of your machine. If, for example, your machine doesn’t have a lot of physical RAM or you’re performing memory-intensive operations (such as video editing) that use up most or all of the physical RAM. It is normally recommended to have 1.5-2 times the size of your RAM, but for a modern desktop computer with more than a couple Gb of RAM, swap may not be necessary.

It is also highly recommended to have one partition to hold your /home directory, where you can store all your personal data such as documents, photos, customised settings for the desktop environment etc.

It is optional to have one partition to hold the /usr directory, where application files are stored (similar to the “Program Files” directory in Windows or the “/Apps” in Mac OS X).

Optionally you can create one partition to hold the /var directory, where system log files are stored. But unless you are running a server machine, this is probably unnecessary.

An advantage of having more than one partition to hold separate directories is that you can reformat one partition without affecting others. For example, you can re-install Salix on your machine (and this goes to the partition holding the “/” directory) while leaving the partition holding the /home directory intact.