Linux was originally designed as a general purpose operating system without consideration for real-time applications. Recently, it has become more attractive to the real-time community due to its low cost and open source approach. In order to help the real-time community, we will present in this paper the practical steps required to achieve a real-time Linux by applying the PREEMPT-RT patches which will provide Linux with these capabilities. We will also focus on some of the kernel configuration that should get attention while building the kernel in order to maintain the real-time behavior of the system during runtime.