First of all, I suggest you use newer versions of the available software. Why not use Ubuntu 14.04 and RTAI 4.0 (recently 4.1 was also released)?
That said, RTAI-enabled kernel configuration requires a lot of playing around. Each piece of hardware may have its own issues that may not play well with RTAI.
There are people who have tried making debian packages for RTAI though, and in my experience it has worked great. This is instruction from the author (John Morris):
(replace 'wheezy' with 'jessie' if applicable)
# Install the Dovetail Automata archive signing keys
wget http://deb.dovetail-automata.com/pool/main/d/dovetail-automata-keyring/dovetail-automata-keyring_0.1-1~wheezy1_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i dovetail-automata-keyring_0.1-1~wheezy1_all.deb
# Configure the archive sources
echo "deb http://deb.dovetail-automata.com wheezy main" |\
sudo bash -c 'cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/machinekit.list'
# Update package indexes
apt-get update
# Install packages
apt-get install librtai1 librtai-dev
# amd64 architecture:
apt-get install \
linux-image-rtai.x86-amd64 linux-headers-rtai.x86-amd64
# i386 architecture:
apt-get install \
linux-image-rtai.x86-i686-pae linux-headers-rtai.x86-i686-pae
With Ubuntu 14.04, replace wheezy
with trusty
. This installs both the RTAI-enabled kernel (the two last commands) and the RTAI library (first apt-get install
). If you want your own configuration for RTAI, you can simply just install the kernel and build your own library.