Well, I wouldn\'t recommend autopartitioning even though some distros allow yu to do so, you might ask why? Well, by partitioning drive yourself you are in control of the HDD space you got, let\'s say you choose basic workstation install and you selected autopartition you\'ll get /boot partition something around 50K or less, / about 10% of the space, roughly 30% for /usr (if you choose to have /usr, otherwise it wil be merged into / giving you about 30% of / overall), and the rest would go to /home, let\'s say the partion for linux is less than 3G you\'ll fill the /usr entirely leaving /tmp with something insignificant and if you do a lot of downloads and you are on broadband you\'d want to get .ISO\'s to try another distors, you\'d want to get mp3\'s and stuff, well it might not work \'cause all the downloads are stored in /tmp while in the progress of downloading, it is just an example. So just remember that everything you install on your system will end up in /usr, /usr/local, /opt by default (you can override the defaults - that\'s one of the ideas to have Open Source Operating System on your computer) so at least /usr should be big enough to hold all the software you install during OS installation as well there should be enough room if you plan on installing other software, all the logs are endup in /var (so if you are running something like Webserver, ftp server - expect the logs to grow rapidly), now /boot - 50K is enough it will hold the information about your boot sectors (where to find them, etc), your kernel image (you can actually control where to put it, by default it finds home under /boot), / should be as minimal as possible if it is a partition on its own on your system, and /home is where all your personal files and setting will be stored.
Hope this helps.