I must strongly disagree with both duelafn and rowdog about partitioning. It is generally unnecessary and actually can be a source of hassle to split your drive in lots of partitions, because it's all too hard guessing what you will actually need. On the other hand, using only one partition is absolutely to be forbidden. It should be the Golden Rule of the Linux User : always use a separate /home partition. I insist on it : always.. If your disk's too small, go buy another one to host your /home, they're really dirt cheap anyway.

With a separate /home, you can reinstall the system, you can even easily switch distribution without risking losing all of your data.

Concerning the editors, newcomers are to be advised to look for some threads on this very subject here, particularly Perl Development Tools.