I may be lucky about Debian as I have sucessfully installed it on a variety of hardware without any problem including a Dell Inspiron 2500(Celeron with i810), A Dell Dimension 400(ancient PII 400 with TNT2), Xbox, A Panasonic sub-notebook with SIS chipset and strange screen resolution and a MSI MegaPC again with pretty strange hardware(SIS, six in one card reader) and a remote virtual server running uml. Oh, the latest is a colinux that runs under XP.

Every time, I just do a debootstrap to have the basic woody up and running then add the rest from various repositories.

In fact, I would say debian is the best for all the distro I have tried, including Knoppix. It is the only distro that I don't need to have any boot up media. All I need is to carry around a mini-linux with network support then I can debootstrap, on all the machine I have tried. I believe the same can be done with Gentoo but it would take more time because it likes to compile everything from scratch, not suitable for my hardware inventory.