A typical mining rig isn't your production-class server running old stable userland.
Given the single purpose of the mining rig, the smaller, the more stripped, the more stable, the better.. that does not match, sadly, the goals of most new distros. I've been running on Fedora14/15 and am actually trying to move backwards to Centos5 for the greater stability... currently being stopped short compiling 1.6.1 with:
if gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I. -pthread -fno-strict-aliasing -I./compat/jansson -I./lib -I./lib -O3 -Wall -msse2 -I/usr/src/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx32/include -g -MT cgminer-main.o -MD -MP -MF ".deps/cgminer-main.Tpo" -c -o cgminer-main.o `test -f 'main.c' || echo './'`main.c; \
then mv -f ".deps/cgminer-main.Tpo" ".deps/cgminer-main.Po"; else rm -f ".deps/cgminer-main.Tpo"; exit 1; fi
if gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I. -pthread -fno-strict-aliasing -I./compat/jansson -I./lib -I./lib -O3 -Wall -msse2 -I/usr/src/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx32/include -g -MT cgminer-util.o -MD -MP -MF ".deps/cgminer-util.Tpo" -c -o cgminer-util.o `test -f 'util.c' || echo './'`util.c; \
then mv -f ".deps/cgminer-util.Tpo" ".deps/cgminer-util.Po"; else rm -f ".deps/cgminer-util.Tpo"; exit 1; fi
util.c:227: error: expected declaration specifiers or ... before curlsocktype
which sounds a lot like problems with older curl to me..
.