Ubuntu :: Editing Partitions By Hand?

I am looking to set up a separate /home partition and am getting somewhat confused. On an old system I practised resizing the partitions and feel reasonably confident in the mechanics.

Currently my drive is /dev/sda1 an ext4 file system with a mount point of / ;
/dev/sda2 and extended partition and /dev/sda5 a linux swap.

I propose to reduce the sda1 to about 10GiB for Karmic and allocate the bulk of the remainder to /home. It is this point that I start to have difficulty. I have seen screen shots which show a mount point of /home and for the life of me I have been unable so far to see how this is created. This has been further confused when looking at the subject in my latest copy of Linux Format (132) where it shows an example where dev/sda1 if NTFS, sda2 as ext3 and a mount point of /home, sda3 as ext4 and mount point of / finally sda4 being a Linux swap.

I wish at the end of the day to have Karmic as my OS with a separate /home partition with the view that once Lucid has settled down that I adopt it.

What I would like to know is how having reduced sda1 do I proceed. As sda1 is an ext4 file system should the /home be also ext4 or like the example in the magazine of ext3? How is the mount point for /home named? Finally should I attempt to have /dev/sda number sequentially or let things stick as at present I imagine that if I delete the current extended and swap before reducing the /dev/sda1 then that should get things to run in sequence.

I intend to use a live DVD to let me work with the partitions as this should be safer than messing about with my current partitions when mounted.