> 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.