Re: What packages are safe to remove (purge)?
 

I think it was EggTimer's fault. It could not cope well with the phone being switched off while it was counting down. It registered an alarm with alarmd and, after power down and up, the alarm triggered, but EggTimer was not running any more so there was no one to cancel the alarm. Or something like that anyway.

SSH to the rescue. Nothing else worked, pressing Stop in the dialogue just closed the dialogue which immediately sprang back and started playing again, giving me only a few seconds to do something. Repeating it several times rebooted the device. The only thing that worked was logging in through SSH and running
It had the unfortunate side effect of deleting all my alarms; fortunately I had only four.

However, I have also noticed that my whatsitsname that pops up when you press the blue up arrow and Sym/Ctrl and allows you to type extra keys now looks like this (see below). Never mind the accented characters, that's deliberate. I am referring to the colours. Could that be the result of uninstalling ezitext?

Re: What packages are safe to remove (purge)?
 

Yup. I have exactly the same in my dev-N900 where I've also removed ezitext* including dependencies and reverse dependencies.

I think the culprit is hildon-input-method-widgets and/or hildon-input-method-plugins-western, which gets uninstalled when imengines-ezitext gets removed.

When those are removed, I guess we just get some sort of default hard-code keyboard assistant.

Re: What packages are safe to remove (purge)?
 

Another N900 "gem" worth noticing, thanks for the information :)

Re: What packages are safe to remove (purge)?
 

Confirmed same issue here, shame there's no way of installing them with out pulling ezitext back again. Daft Nokia dependencies. :(

Re: What packages are safe to remove (purge)?
 

Yes way! Why not download packages and repackage them without dependecies? Is it against the license? If not, I think it would be worth to give a shot and check if it works without these dependencies... Even if not, the other package contents may be extracted, examined and modified to contain only stuff needed for these.

edit: i mean, for personal use of course ;)

Re: What packages are safe to remove (purge)?
 

I guess this would also be something for CSSU (I already suggested in the CSSU thread that they could have a look at unnecessary dependencies). Unfortunately it may not be such a relevant topic (e.g. vs portrait support..) for the general public (which seems to have been the target for Nokia *and* for CSSU. We have to start assuming that only geeks, and an ever-decreasing number at that, actually own and use a N900).

Add.: Hmm.. maybe it's time for Maemo5 - Hacker edition

Re: What packages are safe to remove (purge)?
 

Well, without recompiling them obviously.
As mentioned in a another thread there are lots of silly dependences that are not really proper (Nokia MetaPackage).
Will take some time to work out what can be removed and what is required.

Re: What packages are safe to remove (purge)?
 

Given the amount of traffic in this thread, I cannot but agree :)

I thought Maemo was a hacker edition :)

Edit: I am assuming that all the zzz scripts can go too. The "remove first boot flag" one is a no op anyway.

Re: What packages are safe to remove (purge)?
 

Repackaging to remove wrong dependencies != recompiling. Repackaging can be done by anyone with access to vi and tar on own system (assuming that autobuilder is working), or if we want to avoid autobuilder, deb* tools too.

None of this require any recompiling, so it can be done for closed-source packages, too. BTW, re-packaging is not against any license. You can even put it into official repos - just remember to use non-free for closed source things, and, use modified names... (to avoid overwriting original packages - current state of repos is so wonderful, that anyone can overwrite any essential package with anything, in -devel).

Re: What packages are safe to remove (purge)?
 

Not quite (at least in my book).

Yup. We'd need to figure out which of the scripts in /etc/init.d are executed, sourced or linked by any other startup scripts (which we know now are *only* in /etc/event.d).

fmtx, funambol-cpp-api, iphb, ke-recv, ke-recv-extra, kernel-power (yup, ssh script is in /etc/init.d), pymaemo-optify, rcS, reboot, shutdown, wappushd).

As long as the above scripts don't call other scripts also in /etc/init.d we could edit/patch the corresponding scripts in /etc/event.d to include the relevant content.

Then not only /etc/rc?.d and /etc/event.replace.d/ could be deleted, but also /etc/init.d.

And then (finally) the startup scripts would all be nicely and self-containedly :) placed under /etc/event.d.

Not that it would change anything, per se, but who doesn't want a clean system?!