Last night during Veronica Mars (a show about a high school girl, the daughter of a private detective, who is investigating the disappearance of her mother and the murder of her best fried) I heard my first mention of Linux, and specifically Ubuntu, in a television show.

In this weeks episode the school has been receiving bomb threats. As Veronica is walking towards the school’s computer lab she hears two people arguing (I won’t get the dialog exactly right):

Male voice: If you haven’t even tried Ubuntu how can you say you don’t like it? It had the 2.6 kernel and Gnome 2 on the day Warty Warthog was released.

Female voice (who turns out to be Mac, the resident girl geek Veronica turns to for computer help): I’m happy with OS X. It’s got (something about all the awkgrep that I need) and I don’t have to worry about font de-uglification.

Male: You don’t have to do font de-uglification anymore, and it’s free! You’re living in the dark ages!

Mac: I don’t care, I know what I like and I like what I know.

The male Ubuntu geek turned out to be the person making the bomb threats, but the threats weren’t real. He was trying to frame a bully who had beaten him throughout Junior High. Kinda interesting considering Ubuntu means “humanity to others.” Mac, of course, means “Macintosh”. Windows XP means, “I’m not a cool enough OS to get mentioned or used by any of the hip characters on the show.”