Novell is to release new updates for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time operating system next month.

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat today kicked out the 1.2 release of its Enterprise MRG Linux variant for real-time, messaging, and grid computing. Enterprise MRG was launched as an idea in December 2007 in the wake of Novell's roll-out of its SUSE Linux Enterprise Real-Time variant of its SLES server Linux distro a month earlier.

Novell this week announced that it has entered into an agreement with server and storage switch vendor Voltaire on a joint software package -- featuring real-time SUSE Linux -- that improves performance of real-time trading applications in the financial markets.

The real-time web is shaping up to be the next online revolution, and as we saw during our RealTime CrunchUp earlier this month, it’s already begun. But there are still some things that are holding us back — for one, many services still aren’t actually real time, they’re just something close to it.

For the last several years, Red Hat has been pushing forward the development of real-time enhancements for Linux. Yet the company has made no formal product announcement of how it would attempt to productize its real-time Linux innovations.

The Real-time Linux Workshop has issued a call for papers for its ninth annual event, set for Nov. 2-4 in Linz, Austria. This year's event has a special focus on industrial case studies, but authors are invited to submit original work on a range of topics related to real-time Linux.

With Red Hat, Novell - and now Intel, thanks to its $884m acquisition of Wind River - all crowding into the real-time Linux space, Concurrent has to keep on its toes and keep its RedHawk Linux, well, current. With RedHawk Linux 5.4, announced Tuesday, Concurrent is slipping into Linux 2.6.31 and offering full compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 update 4.

We already wrote about a wallpaper application for Linux which displays the current weather, moon phases and time of day based on your current location, in real time. This time, I'm going to tell you about a script created by Claudio Novais @ Ubuntued which displays a picture of the Earth, in real time.

This article explores some of the Linux architectures that support real-time characteristics and discusses what it really means to be a real-time architecture.