For everyone that like me, or by choice, will eventually face the kernel recompilation process to change the configuration, here is the fastest and painless way i was able to find and get to work.
Recompiling without changes will produce a kernel very similar to the original version provided with the distribution, or at least better than the one you can get retrieving the sources with apt.
The following instructions are intended for the ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) kernel, but they may work with near versions (previous or subsequent) and maybe even relatively far ones.
You will need to replace “2.6.31-14.48″ with the desired version.

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sudo su -

#INSTALL NEEDED PACKAGES
apt-get clean
apt-get update
apt-get install fakeroot build-essential crash kexec-tools makedumpfile git-core libncurses5 libncurses5-dev kernel-wedge
apt-get build-dep linux

#SOURCE DOWNLOAD (via git)
mkdir -p /mynewkernel/karmic
cd /mynewkernel/karmic
git clone git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git source
cd source/

#VERSION SELECT
ls -l /boot | grep vmlinuz                  #installed kernels
uname -a                                    #kernel in use
cat debian.master/changelog | more          #kernel changelog
git tag -l Ubuntu-2.6.31-14*                #available kernel sources
git checkout Ubuntu-2.6.31-14.48

#CONFIGURE
debian/rules updateconfigs

#COMPILE
debian/rules clean
AUTOBUILD=1 skipabi=true skipmodule=true fakeroot debian/rules binary-debs