how to tell what release of Ubuntu you are on??
 

okay so i have been using dapper 6.06 for some time now and regularly do the updates..
i see version 6.10 has been released so i did a $sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and got all the updated packages.
after a reboot i do a $uname -r and it reports kernel version is 2.6.15-26-386

Is this the most bleeding edge kernel?
I cannot remember what it was before..

thanks!

The latest kernel is 2.6.17-10-generic. To check your running version type lsb_release -a.