Partitioning can be done in a very sophisticated way. Currently I have only some first thoughts. I assume that with laptops there are still some reasons (e.g. updating the firmware of PCMCIA cards and BIOS) to share Linux and Windows9x/NT. Depending on your needs and the features of your laptop you could create the following partitions:
BIOS, some current BIOSes use a separate partition, for instance COMPAQ notebooks
suspend to disk, some laptops support this feature
swap space Linux
swap space Windows9x/NT
Linux base
Linux /home or data
common data between Linux and Windows9x/NT
small (~32MB) boot partition for yaBoot (Linux/PPC boot loader), in HFS MacOS Standard format.
Note this chapter isn't ready yet. Please read the appropriate HOWTOs first.