So, my new toy is the Nokia n810 (for $210 shipped). One of my few complaints is the cruft that is bundled in, eating up the limited run-time memory space and cluttering up the interface area. It's nice that it came with built in chat and email clients, but Pidgin and Claws Mail do those jobs much better, so I don't want to the built in ones hanging around. I also don't need several MB worth of language data installed, or User Guides in 20 languages.

1. LOCALEPURGE:
So, let's get started with cleaning some stuff out. The first thing we'll do comes from a forum post over at the Internet Tablet Talk forums: Localepurge for Diablo. It is a package to automatically clear out the undesired locale information (language translations) and keep them cleaned out.

First thing you'll need to do is get root access to the device. I do this using the 'rootsh' application which is easily installed. Once you have rootsh installed fire up the XTerminal and gain root access.
~ $ root
BusyBox v1.6.1 (2008-09-18 09:43:17 EEST) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
Nokia-N810-43-7:~#

Then we'll need to install a dependency first, 'libpcre3':
Nokia-N810-43-7:~# apt-get install libpcre3

You'll say yes to the prompt wanting you to agree to this install (I did all of this earlier and don't feel like re-flashing my device just to get the exact output, sorry).

Once that dependency is installed you'll want to download the two other dependencies. You can find links to them on the linked forum post, but I'll mirror them here for your convenience: pcregrep_6.7-1osso1_armel.deb and color_ls_1.0-1_armel.deb

Once you've downloaded these to the n810 use the XTerm to change into the directory where they're stored, and install them using dpkg:
Nokia-N810-43-7:~# dpkg -i pcregrep_6.7-1osso1_armel.deb
and
Nokia-N810-43-7:~# dpkg -i color_ls_1.0-1_armel.deb

Those, hopefully, installed nicely for you as they did for me. Now we're ready to actually install the localepurge program. The link is in the forum for this as well, and here's my local mirror: localepurge_0.5.8_all.modfied.modfied.deb Install it:
Nokia-N810-43-7:~# dpkg -i localepurge_0.5.8_all.modfied.modfied.deb

By default localepurge saves the English locales and removes all others. If you need to save a different one you can supposedly put the locale folder name into a file at /etc/locale.nopurge. My guess as to how this would look would be to simply go into /usr/share/locale and find the folder you care about, for example "pt_PT" (whatever locale that is). The simplest way to put that into the /etc/locale.nopurge would be to (as root still) do:
Nokia-N810-43-7:~# echo pt_PT > /etc/locale.nopurge

Once you've got everything all set just run
Nokia-N810-43-7:~# localepurge && docpurge

You should get a summary at the end about the amount of space freed. I ran the two commands separately and there was no clear indication that docpurge did anything on its own so, perhaps that part doesn't do anything.

2. USER GUIDES:
Lots of user guides come pre-loaded onto the system. You can see them from the file manager under the "Nokia N810 -> Documents -> User guides" directory. (In case you were wondering, like I was, the 5 "Nokia N810 -> *" directories are located at /home/user/MyDocs/.documents .games .images .sounds .videos). Just go ahead and delete all the user guides for the languages you don't want. You can just do that from the file manager without a hassle. You can probably go ahead and delete all the user manuals, but maybe you want to keep one around.

There's also a 1.3 MB software copyright PDF in the documents folder which I went ahead and deleted.

3. MEDIA:
The N810 comes with some bundled media to allow you to try out the media player. This includes a couple of videos, a song, and some pictures. I happen to kind of like the Moby song that came on mine, so I left it. But the videos I don't need, and the pictures, well, I like to get my cool background pictures from interfacelift.com. So I deleted the stock pictures and videos using the filemanager.

Those are the easy things. Next up I'm going to try some more delicate work to clean up some things like the bundled Gizmo, Rhapsody, and Skype installers and the built-in chat and email clients. But that will be another post.

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