I am hoping to find a way to format a usb stick so that I can boot ubuntu from a macbook or from a pc. I read a bit about rEFIt that allows you to boot a macbook. It seems that the common way is to use a rEFIt formatted CD, then boot the usb from that. It looks like it is possible to format a partition of the usb stick to use rEFIt so yo don't need to bother with a CD but I haven't tried it. But it looks like rEFIt won't boot from a PC. I guess I need grub or lilo for that. Is there any one size fits all for formatting a usb stick that will boot from anything? I am a teacher and all of my kids have macbooks, but a lot of them use other machines from home. I want them to have a chance to work with ubuntu for a unit of work and I don't want to have to mess with burning a whole class set of CDs and I want them to be able to use their ubuntu drives on all of their machines.

Can it be done?