Device driver development on Ubuntu

[SS]

I am planning to practise developing device drivers
(as a beginner) on my Linux system running Ubuntu
5.10. The text book that I am using recommends using
the mainline 2.6 kernel (from kernel.org) for this
purpose, as it says that the kernel in Linux distros
can be heavily patched. So I would like to know if
Ubuntu is good choice in this case. How similar to the
mainline kernel is it?

Thanks.

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