Greetings Folks,

This seems to me to be ambitious but this may be fairly simple to all of you.

I have a 15GB USB drive and I want to run at the very least my own portable chrome/chromium off a USB on each major OS.

Windows answer is easy and need not be addressed because of http://portableapps.com/

I know this is a Linux forum but I am still curious as to whether any of you have advice for OS X.

But First we shall start with Linux:
I do not want a portable OS as much as I do a portable browser and maybe some other apps. While I would probably have one anyway, I'd prefer not to have to reboot every time to use a browser.

There is portable apps for windows, I am wonder if there is an equivalent. Or perhaps I need to compile from source or just regular old .deb some how. However I want the data to remain, such as passwords etc. I am only concerned with Debian based OS's, Ubuntu and Mint particularly, not to concerned about fedora etc.

If wine is necessary, is it possible to run wine off of a usb?

Second if anyone has advice for OS x I will ask here just in case, if not I'll go else where. I want the same to happen on most macs. To me it would seem that I would have to partition off part of the drive for HFS+. Is this necessary? I'm willing to do it but I'm at a loss at how to do it otherwise. Nor do I know how to do it at all, being inexperienced with mac. If I just run from a .dmg would it keep the data from disconnect to disconnect? Or is there some obvious portable app like suggestion?

I'm a Computer tech and so I work mostly on Windows, but often we get some macs. I'm at about CompTIA A+ level and then a little more and a little less. I'm not afraid of compiling form source or command line.

Mostly I want this so that I can do research on the computer without leaving a noticeable record on the customers machine.

If anyone has any suggestions I would love to here it.

Misc: I run on my computer windows 8 and Linux Mint 14. The USB in question is a 15GB San Disk.

I'd guess that you would need every application statically compiled for each OS you intended to run it on. Not a small undertaking and not easy to maintain. As you suggested, you may need to divide the drive up into partitions - Windows and Linux can probably survive on fat32 but OSX would need HFS+ afaik .. but I know next to nothing about Mac's.

most of whats on portableapps.com are there because they are portable version of cross platform apps. For example, Firefox, Thunderbird, Open/Libre/ApacheOffice are all cross platform that have portable builds.

So thats the first step identify what can run cross platform. You have the whole Mozille suite of apps, the Openoffice and its current forks, VLC, Inkscape, Viking, etc. I beleive all those have mac versions as well.

If all you want is to leave no trace why not use the incognito mode then? After all that's what it's intended for. To get a portable browser for Mac os x or Linux I guess you have to tinker with the source code or under the hood configs to have everything stored on the usb drive. Another option is to grab already modified for portability source code of a browser written completely in a cross-platform library like Qt and compile it statically linked.

It is little complecated that to make compatible with all the device and OS. but you can find the alternative software as per your requirment.

well - it seems my DeP 900 XL does not apis correctly as pointing to site above gives 404 call-back