Will give it a try. Thank you.

If you're on a Mac and not a software engineer, forget about creating a bootable USB drive using Ubuntu.

Apparently, the concensus and my personal experience is, it doesn't work.

How about someone update this tutorial to save more newbies from spending hours and hours pointlessly trying to create a bootable Ubuntu USB drive on OS X?  Beuller... Beuller...

Thanks for the information 

These types of newbie guides are just what the doctor ordered.  Thanks for making it interesting/fun as well

really good guide, i think i will revert to this sometimes

I do: brainwallets are a mindblowingly brilliant concept in theory, but risky in practice. Amnesia and death become very expensive with pure brainwallets. That said, the deterministic wallet concept has a lot going for it. You can always store the root passphrase securely without it existing solely in the brain.

Yes, thanks, these are the very instruction I followed numerous times and it does not work, as is the case for quite a few others apparently.  One person on another thread I started on this "problem" suggested using this but I'm a little leary after reading some comments that people that have tried it on some computers couldn't boot into any OS (including the one on their hard drive) after installing it. 

The instructions on Ubuntu's site don't work, period.  all I ended-up with was a converted Ubuntu image on my USB drive that my MBP couldn't recognize at all.

Hence my comment you quoted in the first place.

I'd love to be able to do this but I'm not about to play Doctor Software Frankenstein with my only computer just to be able to boot into Linux from a USB drive.

I might try to burn it to DVD this weekend and see if that makes any difference but there are obviously omissions and inadequacies with this process on at least some Macs. 

This looks like a fairly comprehensive tutorial I found during one of my searches.  As is said there could be issues with Lion and Mountain Lion but for somewhat older Macs it could be worth a try.  I'm thinking of buynig a new MBP right now and if I do I may just give this a try on my present machine running Snow Leopard 10.6.8.

It appears to me in looking around that rEFIt is crucial for dual-booting Linux on many Macs unless one is comfortable with all kinds of other software emulators and/or can work all kinds of magic from the command line?

This is still all complete voodoo to me...

would you trust an online wallet with considerable amount of bitcoins?