Two operating systems on same PC.?

Question

I want to partition off about 8 gigs of my hard drive and run linux (or solaris) on it (for experimental purposes).Currently XP home.
Does this make sense?

If it does make sense, how exactly do I go about doing it, I'll be using Partition Magic, and I dont have the OS as yet.

Answer 1

http://freepctech.com/pc/001/dual_boot_guide.shtml