I assume you are familiar with this thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=82641 FWIW, I have purged a lot of packages from my phone, including the fremantle metapackage, and I could not be happier. The whole purpose of the metapackage is to pull in dependencies. If you don't need the dependencies, you don't need the metapackage. Any autoremoved packages can be installed manually (apt-get install), which will mark them for not getting autoremoved again.