Dual booting with OSX

I'm a designer, but have never used a Mac. Work uses nothing but them, so I need to get used to the OS pretty quickly.

I'm not shelling out £1000 for one, when my machine has better specs. So...

I have a copy of OSX. I have a decent laptop. Would dual booting with XP/Ubuntu + OSX be possible?

I know this should probably be in the Mac forum, but they will likely be of no help to me. Would setting this up be as simple as dual booting ubuntu/xp?

Would I be able to set it up so that I have XP installed on an external hard drive, with OSX as well. So that I can effectively plug in the external, and boot into OSX?

Again, sorry for putting this here. But nix users will be the most experienced with problems of this nature.

I don't see why it wouldn't be possible, after all, you'd just be on another partition. You can partition (in theory) an unlimited amount of times surely?

[RDProgrammer]

Originally Posted by Sark

I don't see why it wouldn't be possible, after all, you'd just be on another partition. You can partition (in theory) an unlimited amount of times surely?

My understanding is that you can have 4 primary partitions and as many extended ones as you need. I always install my OSes to primary partitions. I have done XP/OSX/Ubuntu with the cracked PC-working Leopard disc but it was such a drag on HDD space (on a laptop) and was slow so I got rid of it.

RDP

[Prometheum]

You can do it (I know a few people that have).

I expect it wouldn't be too hard to configure grub for it.

Right ok.

Is it possible to set up an external HD, so that I can boot from it into OSX? Not quite sure how I would go about doing this.

EDIT:
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/in...USB_Hard_Drive

Couldn't ask for it to be any simpler.

[Axiom]

I remember seeing screenshots of lifejunkie running OSX with XP & Fedora under virtualization...

Here's an article which might be helpful:
http://www.applematters.com/article/...s-within-os-x/