Ubuntu questions.

[Seret]

The minimum you should need partition-wise for linux is boot, swap and root. (You could technically do without swap if you have a fair amount of memory, but really you're much better off with some swap than without.)

You don't need a /boot partition. It's only necessary for unusual filesystems or disk setups. Running a standard Ext4 system it would be a bit of a pain, as your kernel updates could fill the partition.

As for swap, I run with a swapfile instead of a partition. The installer will complain (it's default setting is to create one) but it's a perfectly workable option.

Putting /home on its own partition used to be very popular, and TBH my disk is still set up this way. These days though you can reinstall and the installer (on Ubuntu at least) is smart enough to not wipe your existing data in /home, so a separate partition is less useful.

[Nuke]

my setup sticks the swap partition on an old 2gb cf card on an ide adapter. its slow but it has better random access than a hard drive. would be better if i doubled (or quadrupled) it up as a raid0 in the bios, but my adapter is one slot and i only have one cf card (im not putting any money into that machine).