Well, I am trying to install Fedora on my old 72GB external Hard Drive, and so far it is going good. I just need to know what I should set the partitions to.

1. BIOS Boot partition: 2MB, correct?
2. the boot partition: 10MB, correct?
3. root partition: The rest of the space (external will be just for fedora, for now) left over, correct?

now, my problem is, what should I set for the /home partition, the /tmp, the /var, the /usr/local and the /opt?

I rarely create any partitions other than / and swap, and by "rarely" I mean "only once and that was by accident".

There are those who like separate /home and /boot partitions; so I can see the point of them. But you don't really need them, unless you do plan to install other operating systems on here later.

However, /tmp, /var, /usr/local, and /opt really do not need to be their own partitions- even if you are going to put other distros on here.

My advice is to keep everything in one partition; it will make everything much easier. Just set its mount point to / while installing.

Really? Well, I guess I need the install Fedora on external HDD tutorial for dummies. First off, what should I have my Hard Driver formatted as? The problem is that after booting into Fedora from a USB, I am trying to install it onto my External HDD, and whatever I tried I always got a "Not enough free space" error

so, I guess the place to start off would to ask, what should I format my External HDD as, before I start?

The installer should let you partition your drive. You should create an ext4 partition for /, and a swap partition that ideally should be as large as the amount of RAM you have. The way your drive is formatted currently shouldn't matter.

Can't you tell it what drive to install to (your external), and say "Erase and use whole drive"? If not, it should be ext3 (it can, of course, be other things, but ext3 is the easiest). I think Fedora even uses some sort of virtual partition type, but I'm going on a blank as to what it's called. It should automatically choose that partition type if you tell it to erase the whole drive, I think.

Edit: It seems that there is no benefit to ext3 over ext4, though I thought I had heard that at some point. Either way, it doesn't matter, Fedora can just overwrite everything and will auto-partition (if you ask it to, of course).

There might be an installation option that says something like "Guided: Use entire drive". That should create all the necessary partitions for you and set up LVM.

By default, Fedora uses LVM (logical volume management).

I always manually override it and make it format one ext4 partition manually- and as I just said on IRC, I know of no reason to use ext3 over ext4.