Setting up a Clean Instance of CQ5.6 without the Samples

While installing CQ5.6 I found a log entry that sounded quite interesting:

SlingSettingsServiceImpl Active run modes: [ author, crx2, crx3mongo, samplecontent ]

apparently (not sure if this is new in CQ5.6) you can pass in a runmode during installation to trigger different features of CQ to be installed or not.

Running CQ the first time with these arguments will not install the geometrixx samples at all and to me seems to be the better approach than installing CQ first and then uninstalling the geometrixx samples as suggested in various places and the security guide for CQ.

java -jar cq.5.6.jar -r nosamplecontent

After this installation, your copy of CQ (AEM) will be almost clean of any geometrixx artifacts (there are however some geometrixx-media users that are leftover, they are probably not contained in the example geometrixx code.
Other Available Options

It seems the following options can be set for installation purposes (one from each row, if non is selected the first one is taken):
author | publish
crx2 | crx3
crx3mongo | crx3h2
samplecontent | nosamplecontent

I gave the crx3 | crx3mongo runmodes a try but did not really get a working version of AEM out of that combination – I am sure there will be some sort of documentation from Adobe about those features soon.