maemo.org - Talk - How to delete native apps in N9 using terminal

Quote:

Originally Posted by cddiede (Post 1158897)

apt-get only works with applications that were installed as .deb packages. This may not apply to applications that are a part of the firmware.

Almost all software in Harmattan is a deb package, including pre-installed apps.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheStatsMan (Post 1158924)

You can delete with apt-get twitter, but it will remove other stuff that will wreck the system.

The problem is, to simplify updates Nokia made a giant metapackage (mp-harmattan-00x-pr, number depends on firmware version) that depends on almost everything in the system. Force removing, say, Twitter, will break this metapackage, it gets removed, and the packages it depended on (which are marked as automatically installed) are autoremoved. Half the system disappears if you confirm. Don't do this.

To uninstall these packages without causing breakages, editing /var/lib/dpkg/status and removing them from the dependencies of whichever mp-harmattan package you have should AFAICT (I have not tried this) allow the package to be removed without trashing everything. Removing dependencies is usually a Very Bad Idea, but as it's just a metapackage it shouldn't really make any difference.

Alternatively, you can go without the metapackage entirely and mark the other packages as manually installed, allowing you to remove anything that another package doesn't depend on. This does mean OS updates might not work correctly, but it doesn't look like there'll ever be another, so it's your call.

Of course, either solution doesn't mean removing bits of the system won't break things, it just means it won't do it for no reason. :) YouTube and Twitter apps should be fine to remove this way.