I'm not sure about this - we have definitely found some distributions to be easier to support than others, even just compiling Phenix from source. My advice would be to stick to distributions derived from RedHat (i.e. Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Scientific Linux) or Ubuntu, simply because we will go out of our way to ensure that the binary Phenix installers work on these. (They also have Coot binaries.) That doesn't mean other distributions are necessarily unsuitable, but the software support may be patchier.
I can't remember what CCP4 builds on, but I would be surprised if it doesn't support at least the same OSes.