Attention attracted

However I have not gone so far as to remove basic phone functionality (SMS, dialer, etc.), so what I've done with my spare N900 may not be so relevant. And I didn't document it anyway

My advice would be to go through the Maemo boot process (and this I did briefly document here) and disable any services that are not required (common sense may be useful here . Then test if the N900 still boots OK, and if so try to remove the package owning the disabled service.

The problem with Maemo, as well as with almost any modern Linux, is the whole dependency mess. It can happen that if you attempt to apt-remove, say, the calendar, you will be forced to also remove xorg-xserver, or other non-sensical situations.

For that the only fix is, if you know what you're doing, to edit the package information (alter the dependencies) so that you can still remove a package without breaking the whole, fragile, mess that any apt-based system is.

Another (brutal) option would be to remove the whole apt/dpkg infrastructure, so that you are free (and forced to add/delete files by yourself. This will give you much more control, but may be a bit overkill.

Anyway: the best way of having an N900 without all the unnecessary Maemo "bloat" (depending on the intended purpose, obviously) is to replace it with Arch Linux or some other Linux distribution. I think this is what I will do with my spare-spare.