The name Poseidon was chosen after the God of the seas in Greek mythology, since a large number of oceanologists have been involved in the development of the system.
History
The 3.x family was pre-presented in 2008 at the 9thFree Software International Forum, and received compliments from numerous users, free software enthusiasts, and the GNU/Linux community in general, including from Jon "maddog" Hall of Linux International. Poseidon 3.2 was officially released in the IV Brazilian Oceanography Congress, that took place in May 2010 in Rio Grande, Brazil. For version 4.0, the project changed the base distribution from Knoppix/Kurumin to Ubuntu. This was due to the wide acceptance of Poseidon outside the Portuguese-speaking scientific community, and because of the shut-down of the Kurumin project. The Ubuntu-based releases allow the installation in Portuguese, Spanish, English, German, French, Greek, and other languages. The development team stated, that after Poseidon 5.0, the distribution would focus on bathymetry, seafloor mapping, and GIS software. Many of the bundled CAD and scientific programs were removed, but may be separately available for download from compatible repositories. The current running Poseidon version is 8.0, and is based on 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, as the goal of the project is to offer a stable distribution, which will be updated when the special packages and the base system so require.
Features
Throughout its release history, the distro has contained many free software programs used in science and engineering, such as the Fortran programming language, Kile and Lyx for scientific writing, numerical modeling, 2D/3D/4D visualization, statistics, CAD, genetics, bio-informatics, and several tools that support GIS and mapping. Common day-by-day programs are also included, such as LibreOffice, web browsers, multimedia packages, and some games. The core of Poseidon is always the Debian family due to the higher stability and greater amount of software available in repository sites. That way, users of Debian, Ubuntu, or derivative distributions would find Poseidon equally accessible. Much of the support material and tutorials would apply just the same.
