I am new here and I'm sure I will have all sorts of questions, but for starters, here is some background and two quick questions.

My new Toshiba NB305-410 should be arriving tomorrow with Win 7 Starter, and I want to immediately move to a dual boot Linux system. I have heard good things about Mint and Peppermint so I will likely be trying Mint 9, LXDE Mint, and Peppermint Live CDs to checkout HW compatibility and see what I think.

My "normal" machine is a MacBookPro which of course has Apple's versions of BSD underneath and I also have MacPorts installed, so I have done some Unix exploring, a little problem solving, and a little Perl programming. However, I am a Linux newbie and a Unix amateur.

Q1: Can I burn live CDs on my Mac and boot them on my netbook? In fact, can I make a live boot usb stick on the mac and use it on my netbook?

Q2: Assuming Q1 is yes, can I test the CDs or usb sticks on my Mac?

I am quite concerned here since the MacBookPro is my steady, dependable, get things done machine, where the netbook is a new toy to experiment on. With the netbook, I will have "restore to factory condition" backup disks and would do that with impunity. However, I do not want to spend the time and lose the productivity inherent in restoring my Mac from backups. I would be happiest if the live CD didn't mount my laptop drive, and I really would not like it near my MBR.

Answers and suggestions will be most appreciated, especially if these questions are not sensible.

Thanks,
Alan

I have a friend who runs Ubuntu on a Macbook Pro, so the answer to both questions is yes.

However, it sounds like you should set up a virtual machine on on your Macbook and install Mint into it. Just download VirtualBox from its homepage and set it up.

dugan,

Thanks for the excellent advice--Virtualbox worked with ease. I was able to set up a plain Ubuntu VM and tried out several live Mint iso files and installed peppermint just to see how that would go.

Alan