liveCD's on Intel Macs [Puppy Linux variants]
I've booted a couple of recent Puppy Linux variants (Puppy 4.3.1, Lucid Puppy 5.0, & Quirky Puppy 1.1) on an old core duo macbook pro. Unfortunately, these variants don't recognize Apple's touchpad or mouse bar, so I needed to use an external USB mouse to run. Everything else worked without issue, including automatically setting the display resolution. I did need to manually configure the wireless via a couple of dialog boxes, since I was on a WPA/PSK router, but this was quite straightforward.
Note: I did have a dual boot setup originally (mac OS & Windows partitions, HFS & FAT respectively), so I could save a "usersave" file with personal settings & such to the FAT partition to speed bootup on subsequent boots from the liveCD. I have yet to test the DVD playback capability, but plan to do so in a few days or so. [Puppy Lunux loads the OS into ram, so you can eject the liveCD disk & insert something else, like an audio or video disk.]
I'll report back with further experiences.
I've also run the ISO images of these variants as virtual machines in VMware Fusion 3.0 (under OS X), but there are no compatibility issues & everything ran properly without any hiccups.