Typically, most distributed, dependable, real-time systems designed in the past can only meet the particular requirements of the application domain to which they were targeted. This approach led to specific, non-flexible, dedicated and non-reusable solutions, often based on specialized hardware.This paper presents an alternative approach where a flexible run-time support for distributed dependable hard real-time applications is built on top of off-the-shelf hardware. This support has been designed by considering three fundamental and complementary aspects: real-time, to support applications that exhibit strict timing constraints; fault-tolerance, to provide a high degree of reliability through the transparent provision of fault tolerant mechanisms; and flexibility, to allow the modifications of components of the run-time support without having to rewrite it entirely, and to support a large range of application domains, real-time kernels and hardware.