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.
Wow, sounds like you know a lot about Debian, then. The XBox sounds like it would be especially hard to configure. Don't you have to start out by defeating a built-in encryption mechanism?

I did successfully install Woody on an old K6/266 (which is probably as far as it's going to go, OS-wise). It works fine, even ALSA. I think that what really frustrated me on the Athlon was "agpgart" not loading and X not working, with no clear view of how to fix it. (Next time I'm in Powell's I'll have to look for a book on Debian.)

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.
Looks like they have a 30M ISO and several floppy images on the Debian-Installer site to let you do just that.

It was a learning experience. One of these days, I'll try it again. Thanks for listening.

And for those who want to dual-boot with Win2K or XP but don't want a bootloader to touch their existing MBR, may I suggest Topologilinux's grubinstall, available here. Works great with a hard disk install of Knoppix.