As we mentioned last week, a new version of Puppy Linux is out and, because Puppy is extremely lightweight, it's an ideal candidate for installation on a USB stick or similar portable storage device.
If you're comfortable with Puppy and install it on a portable device, it can work from any machine you plug into, which means you can use a familiar system where ever you go. Installing Puppy on a USB stick isn't very difficult, but with the basic installation you won't be able to run it on a Mac.
Fortunately the folks over at Hackszine have published a detailed tutorial on how to create a bootable image that will work on a Mac. The Hackszine method uses Q, the OS X port of the QEMU virtual machine, to create a Puppy Linux installation that will run under OS X and fit on a flash drive.
I haven't have a chance to try it yet, but it doesn't look too difficult and in the end you'll be able to use your portable install on any Mac.
Even better, as the tutorial mentions at the end, if you add Windows and Linux QEMU executables to the drive you'll to boot the same Linux virtual machine on all three platforms — portable, free and cross platform, it doesn't get much better than that.
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