Dual Booting FreeBSD or Linux with XP

Will I have to install either FreeBSD or Linux on a separate partition as Windows XP? And will there be any conflicts and stuff? I wanna use FreeBSD but if there would be problems I'll settle with Linux. I haven't decided which distro yet but that'll be later.

Seems the best way to do it, not all bsd/linux distro can write to an NTFS partition , also if your bsd/linux got fubared somehow at least your windows partition wont be affected.