you dont have to setup a swap partition with linux, but its the customary way of doing it, it is possible and quit easy to make a swap file on the primary partition and use that, just like you can allocate sections of RAM, you could make a swap file in RAM if you wanted too
any journaled filesystem is the way to go, ive had power failures before, and on one occasion it messed up my ext2 partition beyond repair, worst thing with a resierJFS is you have to rebuild the journal tree after a power failure, and thats easy
depends on which GUI NIN, there's about 7 or 8 good ones these days, if you cant find one you like I dunno what to tell you, everything from very spartan to windows like to what windows is heading towards in the future