Trouble Partitioning HDD Linux dual-boot

[Zoidberg]

1. How do I give the first partition to the far left a root, swap, and home folder? Is that necessary? Should I use some of the unallocated 44 GiB to make these?

2. When creating the new parition what File System should I create it to, and which should it be on Logical or other? How much space should I give to each of these folders?

Some people say leave it on default, some people say it should be fat32, some say ntfs, what is the correct one?

3. In "System Monitor" under "Hardware" it says 2 GiB of "System Memory" is required. So when creating the root, swap, and home folder, do they each need 2GiB, or is that all together, or is that only for one of the three?

Please help, I am sitting at my desk waiting! Thanks very much.

1. It's not strictly necessary with a modern computer. If you want to use the suspend to disk function (hibernate) then you need a swap partition at least equal to the amount of RAM you have (it's probably best to add 10-15% on top of that for bad sectors etc.). A separate home folder is useful if you want to tinker with you system, because if you break it you can just reinstall leaving the home partition intact and keep all of your files. But this is completely optional. It's up to you what you use to create these partitions, I'd use the 40gb of unallocated space, because it's wasted otherwise.

2. There are a number of filesystems to choose from, the swap partition needs to be formatted as linux-swap (if that's not the exact name, it will be similar), otherwise you can use a number of filesystems. Do not use fat32, it's not suitable for operating systems. NTFS isn't designed for Linux-based operating systems and you should never use it (apart from on Windows of course). If you don't know what to go for use ext4 as mentioned by AceInfinity.

3. I haven't used LMDE or any other Debian based distro for a while, but I'm sure as the distro is aimed at newer users (for the most part) the installer will handle the partitioning for you. When you come to the paritioning part of the installer you will probably be able to simply click the free space and then hit next on the installer. If not, there will probably be an option along the lines of "Install LMDE in the largest free space". That would be the option to take.

There really isn't a need to triple boot these distros though. Make sure you backup.