[lug] Sharing Partitions between different Distros/CPUS?

[siegfried]

One of the reasons I want to install debian on my PC is that debian (to my
knowledge) is the only distro that will run on both my PC and my NSLU2 NAS
controller.

Assuming I got debian and LVM running on both the NSLU2 and my PC, would it
be reasonable to expect 

(1) to be able use debian on my PC to create a boot partition on an USB
drive by using dd to copy a partition from my local SATA drive to the USB
Drive,

(2) unplug the USB drive from the PC, and plug the USB drive into the NSLU2
running debian offsite

(3) Run rsync nightly between my local SATA drive and the remote offsite USB
drive for several weeks and, in the event of accidentally typing fdisk on my
PC,

(4) fetch the USB drive from offsite, use dd to copy the partition from the
USB back to the SATA drive (clobbering the contents) and

(5) boot from the SATA drive partition?

I assumed that this would be only possible if both were running debian and
LVM (or debian and not LVM).

What if the PC is running ubuntu? Would it work then? I have found
directions for installing debian on the NSLU2
(http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/ ). Someone mentioned that ubuntu ran on
embedded systems tonight at the BLUG meeting. I have not found any
references to running ubuntu on NSLU2s.

Thanks,
Siegfried