Hi,
This is one of those issues that is frequently debated and you'll find various schools of thought. If you were running a production (or otherwise important) system then there are good arguments for putting different parts of the directory tree on physically different drives and/or using raid, lvm, etc.
However, unless you need that kind of resilience, you are probably best off keeping it fairly simple and having a scheme like this:
swap : double your physical ram
/boot : approx 32mb unless you want to have a lot of different kernels to boot from at the same time, in which case increase the size accordingly.
/ : You need approx 3.4 gb for an 'everything' install and about 1.2gb for a 'workstation' install, i.e just for the packages without any spare space. So, either way, you would need as much extra space as you can get for your own files, new packages in the future, etc.
If you want to break '/' down into multiple partitions, obvious candidates for separate partitions are /home (if you have a lot of users or put your own stuff mostly there) and /usr .
For an install on a 1.1gb drive, you'll have to do a custom install and reduce the number of packages accordingly. Ultimately, linux can be put on a single floppy disk although the functionality is somewhat reduced !
Hope this helps