Best practices for creating a bootable USB stick that works on both PC an Mac machines?

[Adam Boettiger]

Hello,

I'm looking for best practices for formatting, creating and booting from a USB installed version of Ubuntu or Kubuntu such that the stick will be bootable from both a MacBook Pro and a ThinkPad.

Using a 128 GB Corsair USB drive.

Would prefer to be able to boot multiple OS from it.

Will this require using one stick for the Mac and one for the PC or is there a format that will allow me to boot both machines from the single stick?

Thanks in advance for any help. Reading thus far indicates the MacBook Pro may not be bootable from a stick, so perhaps I may need to partition the hard drive and dual boot, but ideally would like to be able to use one stick and use it to boot Ubuntu from either the Mac or PC.

All the best,
Adam