The advisory council of Bangladesh's caretaker government was sworn in late on Tuesday facing an opposition deadline to prove its neutrality and guarantee fair polls in January.
The 10 officials, effectively Bangladesh's interim cabinet, included a newspaper editor, a former armed forces chief, a headteacher and a human rights lawyer.
The short ceremony shown live on television came amid a lull in violence that has killed more than 20 people since Friday, when the previous government's tenure expired.
Earlier, President Iajuddin Ahmed made his first decisions as head of the non-party interim administration, sacking the chief of a controversial elite security force and the head of the police intelligence agency. Ahmed terminated the contract of Abdul Aziz Sarker, director general of Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), and the country's intelligence chief Farrukh Ahmed Chowdhury, according to government orders.
Both positions were seen as party-political appointments made by the outgoing Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led government.
The dismissals followed a Friday deadline set by the main opposition Awami League for the president to meet a string of demands to demonstrate that he is not partisan.
The president also terminated the contracts of nine top bureaucrats and transferred 18 others in a bid to win the confidence of the opposition parties.
Police said calm was largely restored Tuesday after the country was rocked by several days of violent protests which marred the end of the coalition government's five-year term.
"All the inter-district buses have been operating throughout the country. Things are normal everywhere other than a few isolated incidents," national police chief Anwarul Iqbal told AFP.
At least two more people were reported to have died and 37 were injured in fresh clashes on Monday between BNP and opposition parties, taking the overall death toll to 23.
Millions, however, began returning to cities from their villages having been stranded in the countryside by protest transport blockades following the Muslim Eid al-Fitr festival.
In the capital Dhaka, private cars and buses were back on the roads and the stock market opened -- although there was still a heavy police and paramilitary presence in key locations, police officials said.
The south-eastern city of Chittagong, the country's biggest port, resumed operations with the end of an opposition blockade, port director Kamrul Hossain said.
The opposition alliance has given the president until the end of the week to make changes including the replacement of Election Commission officials and revision of the voters' list.
It accuses the Election Commission's top officials of being pro-BNP and of attempting to rig the election by producing a voters list with millions of "ghost voters".
It had earlier also objected to the government's choice for head of the temporary administration, former Supreme Court judge K.M. Hasan a senior BNP-appointed government official during the late 1970s.
The president named himself as the caretaker chief Sunday after the parties failed to reach an agreement over a compromise candidate.
The opposition has threatened to boycott the polls unless its demands are met, claiming that the BNP has stacked the cards against them by politicising the supposedly neutral non-party caretaker body.