Can I boot multiple Intel Macs from a single external drive

Hi,
We have a MacBook and Intel iMac. I'd like the flexibility to move some software and data between machines, depending on where I'm located and who else in the house needs to use a machine.
Would it work to put all of my software and data on a bootable partition on an external hard drive?
I know back in the Windows world, the operating system would go crazy each time I switched machines, detecting new hardware and installing new drivers (and probably making me go thru activation, too).
Would Tiger be able to handle the movement between machines without too much grief?
I've read some things about Spotlight's indexing behavior, so I'd plan to limit it to the boot drive so it wouldn't thrash itself to death everytime I switched machines.
Any tips/insights/warnings would be appreciated.
Thanks,
h2
MacBook and Intel iMac Mac OS X (10.4.7)
Mac OS X (10.4.6)

hi -
re: apps, i guess i have a different philosophy - apps are small (unless we're talking about garageband!). just install them where you need them...(assuming you're licensed to install on multiple machines yada yada)...
re: data - that's the whole ball of wax right there. what data are you trying to share? emails? databases? bookmarks?
syncing files across machines on a LAN is certainly possible and possibly also trivial, but it'd help if you specified the kinds of data you're looking to share...
re: both apps and data, consider too a regular backup strategy to an external drive and/or DVD media - decent blank DVDs are of order a dime per GB these days in qty...
cheers

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Can I boot multiple Intel Macs from a single external drive

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