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MKLinux, started by OSF (Open Software Foundation) Research Institute and Apple Computer, is an open source computer OS to port Linux to the Macintosh Computers and PowerPC platform. The project began in February 1996, which was led by Brett Halle at Apple. The development was split between Nick Stephen at the OSF in Grenoble, France (Mach porting and development) and Michael Burg (device drivers and distributions) at Apple in Cupertino, California.

MKLinux is an abbreviation for ‘Microkernel Linux’ that refers to the mutation of the Linux kernel to run as a server hosted on the Mach microkernel. It is based on version 3.0 of Mach. It was specifically developed to take advantage of Mach microkernel, unlike the much later Mac OS X. MKLinux provides a UNIX-like user and programming environment, with hundreds of useful commands. The Linux kernel runs as a user-mode process that handles operating system related issues, while Mach microkernel handles low-level I/O and resources allocation tasks.

If you have used UNIX/Linux based systems, then all you need to know is that MKLinux provides extended versions of most System V and traditional BSD commands. This operating system provides several command line interpreters or shells, together with hundreds of shell commands and little programming languages. By merging these tools, either as saved shells scripts or on the command line, you can do some pretty amazing things using MKLinux.

The reuse and creation of simple commands is elemental to the MKLinux way of doing things. MKLinux programmers create small, general-purpose tools and combine them into task-specific scripts and commands. Most of the programs are written in an architecture-independent manner. It uses the same File System Hierarchy (FHS) that are used by other Linux distributions.

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