which was one of two I bought from Walmart for $20.
I plugged it in to see what was on it. The usual encryption stuff, but using a version of Chrome with a smaller Gentoo also. I found three partitions; OEM, STATE and ROOT-A. The OS was the 4.4 kernel. Piece of cake, I thought. Wrong. It turned out to be the longest install I've ever done.
I fired up KParted to delete the partitions and reformat them as one with Btrfs. It turned out that there were over 2 dozen partitions (sdb1 to sdb28) on that stick, most only 512 Bytes but one almost 5.9GB.
Where's the other 10GB? Untouchable by KParted. I tried the "shred" function and it worked. I formatted the 5.9GB as Btrfs and put a boot flag on sdb. That, however, was not enough space for my "persistent" KDE Neon USB stick. Tried fdisk but it couldn't help. Cgdisk, however, had an "Alignment" feature which let me slide the beginning sector down to 34, right near the front end of that "untouchable" space. I re-wrote the partition table and formatted it as ext4 and set the boot flag again.
I rebooted my computer using the KDE Neon User Edition LiveUSB stick made with the 3-17-2017 release. It came up as you would expect. I chose the "Install Neon" from the desktop icon and began the process. My first problem was that the partition table setup would not allow me to deselect the sda5 swap partition. So, I ignored it. I set the 14.6GB as / with Btrfs and started the install. It took about an hour to get to the part where the proprietary stuff is being downloaded and installed. It spent about 45 minutes of the next hour setting at 90% done while it installed one package after another, sloooowwwwlllllyyyyy. That last 8 or so percent took the next 15 minutes.
I shut down, pulled the Neon LiveUSB and left the persistent one in, while hitting F12 to get the device boot menu. Selecting the PNY the boot up was about half as fast as the LiveUSB stick but once the desktop appeared it was relatively quick. Some apps took 30 seconds or so to load but after loading they were as quick as usual.
Since I don't use suspend I plan to convert the 8GB swap into separate /Data btrfs subvolume, which I may just add to the main btrfs.
I plugged it in to see what was on it. The usual encryption stuff, but using a version of Chrome with a smaller Gentoo also. I found three partitions; OEM, STATE and ROOT-A. The OS was the 4.4 kernel. Piece of cake, I thought. Wrong. It turned out to be the longest install I've ever done.
I fired up KParted to delete the partitions and reformat them as one with Btrfs. It turned out that there were over 2 dozen partitions (sdb1 to sdb28) on that stick, most only 512 Bytes but one almost 5.9GB.
Where's the other 10GB? Untouchable by KParted. I tried the "shred" function and it worked. I formatted the 5.9GB as Btrfs and put a boot flag on sdb. That, however, was not enough space for my "persistent" KDE Neon USB stick. Tried fdisk but it couldn't help. Cgdisk, however, had an "Alignment" feature which let me slide the beginning sector down to 34, right near the front end of that "untouchable" space. I re-wrote the partition table and formatted it as ext4 and set the boot flag again.
I rebooted my computer using the KDE Neon User Edition LiveUSB stick made with the 3-17-2017 release. It came up as you would expect. I chose the "Install Neon" from the desktop icon and began the process. My first problem was that the partition table setup would not allow me to deselect the sda5 swap partition. So, I ignored it. I set the 14.6GB as / with Btrfs and started the install. It took about an hour to get to the part where the proprietary stuff is being downloaded and installed. It spent about 45 minutes of the next hour setting at 90% done while it installed one package after another, sloooowwwwlllllyyyyy. That last 8 or so percent took the next 15 minutes.
I shut down, pulled the Neon LiveUSB and left the persistent one in, while hitting F12 to get the device boot menu. Selecting the PNY the boot up was about half as fast as the LiveUSB stick but once the desktop appeared it was relatively quick. Some apps took 30 seconds or so to load but after loading they were as quick as usual.
Since I don't use suspend I plan to convert the 8GB swap into separate /Data btrfs subvolume, which I may just add to the main btrfs.