work on xp desktop

i have sabayon 4 as well as XPsp3 installed on my lappy. Could nyone tell me how do i work on both of the systems simultaneously at the same time??

Welcome to the forums!

Check out VMware to see if it might work for you:

VMware Workstation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Portable Ubuntu, it is very easy to install and use and really unobtrusive, see the screenshot and you'll get what I mean.

This works only for Ubuntu though. If you want Sabayon use either VMWare or better yet VirtualBox, which lets
you create virtual images. The money-free version of VMWare only reads images, you have to pay to create them.

I had to post a link to my blog for this, hope it is ok with the moderators;)
If not, remove the reply, no problem

actually guys, bothh the cases requires me to install a new version of xp on a virtual m/c; whereas i wanna use my existing one. I want to be able to work on the xp environment already present in another partition of my hdd from my linux os

If VMware won't do what you want, you could try coLinux, and/or andLinux:

Cooperative Linux

andLinux.org -- Run Linux natively inside Windows

Perhaps one of them will work for you.

What you want sounds practically impossible with the current tools available...
In this link, it has instructions on how to put your existing windows installation into a virtual image. I don't know if you like it as a solution, especially if you want to continue booting into windows for heavy tasks that require full system resources or for directX stuff. But if you don't, it maybe be a very good solution (provided it works, I haven't tried it)