Definitely take hints from Knoppix! (Score 2, Informative)

The Knoppix autodetection is awesome. I have a cheap monitor/videocard that I have never been able to get working properly at resolutions above 800x600 in any distro, and no matter how much I played with the Xfree86 settings.

Knoppix booted and perfectly autodetected every bit of my hardware. X came up perfectly, so did sound. It worked immediately on first boot! I believe it's all GPL so why not include a lot of the stuff they worked on. It would make debian much better.