What is Mac06?

The POSIX compatible OS for Macintosh

A lightweight environment resembling the UNIX™ programming and user interface. It is built on top of MacOS™ and is therefore virtually hardware independent within the Macintosh computer series, as device drivers already existing are used. The current release is compiled for PowerPC only, but there is no reason not to provide a 680x0 version later.
Not much effort has been spent (yet?) to port all those useful commands found on large scale UNIX systems like grep, sed, awk, cron, ...
The main emphasis was put on to make the system running with full kernel support. Therefore, system call performance is not optimized.
The file system completely relies on the MacOS HFS and, therefore, transferring data between Mac06 and MacOS is very easy.
Programs can be compiled using Symantec C++/THINK C. In this environment, even the MacToolbox (dialogs, windows etc) can be used within Mac06 executables. It is possible to start any Macintosh from within the Mac06 system.
The overlay structure to MacOS has its drawbacks, of course. There is no memory protection and processes are not preemptive.

Download Mac06 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II