I've gotten them working on ubuntu and raspbian wheezy, so I'd vote for any Debian. It's a nice family because there's a lot of users and support.
There's no reason it wouldn't work on CentOS -- what error are you getting?
Sorry - been away a while.
I was running Centos 5. Trust me, it was a bitch trying to get bitcoind compiled and running (and I'm a 20+ year 'nix admin). I'm guilty of not remember the exact problem, but I think the compile was failing on some missing cryptographic library routine that Redhat don't support for a reason I don't quite remember either....
I'm now running bitcoind on Ubuntu 12.04. An absolute breeze compared to Centos 5...
ps. my mining is done via cgminer running on raspbian on a pi....