I'm using Debian Sarge with many Cadence's tools i.e. IC5033, LDV5.0, Assura3.1.2 and I believe others will work fine too. Hspice and Cosmos Scope from Synopsys also work well but they complained some libraries were missing. In my case are libtix, libap40 and libstdc++ which I can search and install all from google.
Don't worry too much about Linux disto. You can use any disto for EDA if you know how to deal with it. But if you don't want to spend too much time to learn on Linux OS. You can savely choose RedHat or Mandrake as you choice.