On such as my ASUS eee box, what is the best way to dual boot Linux maybe Mint or Ubuntu Studio, with XP, on a 80 gb drive with XP on it? Mine has a partition with an XP reset.

I think I will have to find software to use from XP to partition the drive, true?

Dividing it about 20% to XP and 75% to Linux, and keep the reset.

The Gparted Live CD can repartition the drive, however it may damage the recovery partition if you move/resize it, I have had mixed results. If you don't have a CD drive then you can also make USB thumb drive bootable to Gparted or Knoppix which also has Gparted.

Just a thought: Windows XP on 20GB will work however it will be rather cramped if you need to have any programs or data stored there.

You dont need Xp software to partition the drive. If you choose Ubuntu Studio their live CD comes with gparted which you can use for partitioning your drive, just run the live session and run gparted at that live session, reduce the windows volume then install the new OS in the unallocated free space.
30GB for Xp will be fine, then 50GB for the new OS, which you could subsequently partition it in 15GB for the root partition, 2GB for swap partition and the rest for the home partition.

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Your Linux installer will partition the drive for you. The first thing to do is to defrag the Windows installation and, if Windows can shrink the partition it's on, do that job from Windows. The best partitioning scheme would be

sda1 : existing Windows partition : say 20 GB
sda2 : existing XP backup partition
Then in the space freed up in the middle
sda3 : Linux extended partition
Divide that into the following logical partitions
sda5 : Linux root partition for the OS and software, formated as ext4 : say 10GB
sda6 : Linux home partition for your files, ext4 : as much as you can spare
sda7 : Linux swap partition, used if memory runs out : 1GB, or a bit bigger than your RAM if you plan to hibernate.

You can read more about partitions on Wikipedia.

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Is there a way I can find and keep the reset partition, for XP? And should I keep Xandros OS?

^should be; can you please copy-paste the results of this command from a live-usbthe trick would be while intalling your linux distro, do not delete any partitions. just create new ones to install to.

Only if the windows.old files are removed, because the windows.old files take up as much space as the present OS, as windows.old is a backup made during service-pack updates.