Knoppix works on this hardware, Debian and others don't.

[maxIT]

I have an older PC with a 1.3GHz AMD processor and 256MB of RAM. Knoppix LiveCD runs fine on this machine as well as a Knoppix HD install that I tried just today. Other distros, including Debian (Sarge and Etch) installs that I have done, will run for a few minutes and then the system hangs. I have 2 versions of KNoppix, 3.8 with has kernel 2.6.8 and 5.10 which has 2.6.19. Both work fine. I have tried adding noacpi to the boot options on other distros, such as Ubuntu liveCD without any luck. What is different about Knoppix?

I've experienced a similar issue. This is why in my celerons 1.00Ghz I'm still running knoppix 3.4.
In my case I've noticed that isn't something distro_related but kernel_related instead.
Debian etch, most recent knoppix and other distros with 2.6 kernel hangs all.