Install and boot osx on a flash drive

I was looking at this tutorial:

http://tech.bradbergeron.com/guides/howto-install-and-boot-os-x-on-a-flash-drive /

I have a PowerBook G4 12" (ppc) and I want to see if I can get it back up and running. The problem is that the internal optical drive and the hdd are both broken. I would like to create an installer on usb and deploy a working osx installation to a flash drive. I know this is officially supported with osx on intel based machines but not ppc. However, the hack in the article above shows a way that you can run osx from a usb flash drive. My father has a MacBook Air so I can get access to Disk Utility and Pacifist but before I try it I think I might get stuck at the point where you have to copy SetupAssistant, BaseSystem.pkg and Essentials.pkg from the hdd of your working copy of osx (remember I don't have one because the hdd is broken). Either the versions of these files on his machine (10.8) will be different from my 10.6, or they won't exist. Is there a way that I can extract them from the disk or get them from the net.

I know what you're thinking, (just get a new machine already). But I'm really interested in tech and thought it would be nice if I could bodge a solution to this problem together.

Also, this hdd is the second hdd now and I only installed it 2 months ago. The machine is 9 years old. My friend in irc said that it could be a fault somewhere else that caused the incredibly short life span of the new hdd.

I realize this is a wild stab in the dark but I also thought about being able to create and installer for Ubuntu and deploying a working installation of that OS to this machine.

Of course I am only doing this as a matter of interest. It is not because I am too poor to buy a new laptop.

--

Wisey