Poseidon Linux is full GNU/Linux distribution, a complete operating system, originally based on Kurumin, now based on Ubuntu. It is developed and maintained by a team of young scientists from the Rio Grande Federal University in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and the MARUM institute, in Germany.
The name ("Poseidon" was the regent of the sea in Greek mythology) derives from the large number of oceanologists involved in the development of the system.
It contains many free software programs used by students, professors, technicians and scientists, 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... along with day-by-day common utilities like LibreOffice (with many spell-checkers), internet surfing, multimedia, etc. (even some games).
Due to its wide acceptance also outside the Portuguese-speaking scientific community and to the eventual shut down of the Kurumin project, the Poseidon project has changed the base distribution to Ubuntu, to allow the installation in Portuguese, Spanish, English, German, French, Greek and more languages. The core of Poseidon is always the Debian family due to the higher stability and great amount of software available into the repository sites. Also, users of any other Debian or Ubuntu derivative distribution would find no trouble to use Poseidon. Many of the supporting material and tutorials apply fully to it.
The current running version is 4.0, and it is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 32 bits, and soon 64 bits, since the goal of Poseidon is not to deliver one new distro after another, but to deliver a solid, usable and trustful distro for professional, educational, and home computers, that will be updated when the special packages and the base system requires so.
The 3.x family was pre-presented at the 9th Free Software International Forum (2008) – FISL9.0., and received compliments from many users, free-software enthusiasts, the GNU/Linux community and even from Jon "maddog" Hall, from Linux International. Version 3.2 (previous) was officially released in the IV Brazilian Oceanography Congress, that took place in Rio Grande, Brazil, in May 2010.