I’m not yet an owner of the Pioneer FreedomBox, although eager to get one. My question is: Does the official ‘armhf’ Debian image (linked below) support the Pioneer hardware out of the box? Is it possible to boot it ‘as is’ after copying it to an SD card?
Since I’d rather play with the software myself, I would prefer to install the OS on my own - ideally an official Debian, but it could be some other distribution. Hence the second question: Do you have any experience with other distros? Which ones are known to work out of the box?
For installing Official Debian images on Pioneer Edition which is an A20-OLinuXino-Lime2 see this wiki page. See an installation report. After installing Debian, you can install freedombox package to get FreedomBox running.
There is one issue in u-boot with the Lime2 recent revisions with Ethernet when connected in Gigabit mode that drops the transfer rates drastically. See FreedomBox’s fix for it. I also encourage you to see that Freedom Maker tool builds FreedomBox images with just the Debian bits (except for the bug fix).
Other than Debian, many other derivatives should also work. Ubuntu gets recent freedombox packages regularly. Others have reported working with Raspbian.