> What free distro
https://www.parabola.nu/news/parabola-supports-armv7/ Due to the number of free drivers and firmware and the publicly available designs of the Beaglebone Black, many distributions run on it. Parabola GNU/Linux-libre is based on Arch but is fully free. However, it is harder to use than Debian in some ways. You can install Debian on it. They include a build of it on their website, and you may be able (in fact, probably) to run upstream Debian, if the free drivers exist in the Debian kernel. However, video acceleration requires a binary driver and firmware. I'm not sure but it is probably included in the Debian build on their website. Ask on the Beagleboard forum or mailing list. Also have a look at Ångström distribution. This is designed for embedded devices (it is related to the OpenEmbedded project), so the Beaglebone Black will run much faster on this. You could probably install LXDE+VLC+Mplayer on it so that you can run a lightweight media centre. In fact, most distributions with an ARMv7 port run on it. There is an Android build, and it should be possible to run Boot to Gecko, which is the community supported Firefox OS, which is really lovely, and suitable for playing music, videos and browsing the web.

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