I had setup a small solution that used freeradius to authenticate users against active directory on Windows 2003 that resides at another location.

Unfortunately things messed up and had to start fresh again.

I set it all up using Debian 3.1 and compiling all software using the latest sources.

The sources consisted of:

openssl 0.9.8
openldap 2.2.28
freeradius 1.0.4
samba 3.0.20
kerberos 5
berkeley db 4.3

I was wondering if there is any linux distribution that has these packages and is a little easier to configure than compiling all from source.

most distro's will have them ready to roll. If you are building a piece of corporate infrastructure, i'd advise a server level distro like redhat 4. If you have no budget... try Centos, it's a 100% faithful clone fo redhat and will use all the same apackages.