For my notebook, I'm using the following partition / fstab / filesystems layout:
/dev/sda1 / ext3 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1 /dev/mapper/vg1-lv1 /home ext3 relatime 0 2 /dev/sda2 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/hda /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0 /dev/mapper/vg1-vzg /var/lib/vz/private ext3 noatime 0 0
It results in something like this:
# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 9.2G 6.8G 2.0G 78% / tmpfs 1004M 0 1004M 0% /lib/init/rw udev 10M 136K 9.9M 2% /dev tmpfs 24M 0 24M 0% /dev/shm /dev/mapper/vg1-lv1 50G 31G 16G 66% /home tmpfs 1004M 4.0K 1004M 1% /tmp tmpfs 1004M 0 1004M 0% /var/lock tmpfs 1004M 136K 1003M 1% /var/run /dev/mapper/vg1-vzg 7.9G 1.6G 6.0G 21% /var/lib/vz/private
I may setup autofs for the vz mount, as I rarely use it. I've just recently started using autofs for NFS mounts and I like it so far. Will it help anything?
To summarize, I usually use a partition of around ten gigabytes for root. I mount /home separately using relatime because apparently mutt is one app which likes atimes. I use ext3 because it has worked for me near 100% of the time. I mount a lot of the tmp folders as tmpfs to keep the disk spun down if possible.
And oh yeah, one more thing - LVM is awesome.