In the manufacturing industries, agility and flexibility are the key issues to meet the various market demands. From this point of view, open architecture control has many advantages. This paper suggests a real-time Linux-based open architecture controller. Linux-based and windows-based controllers are compared in several aspects, and Linux is shown to be advantageous over the windows. With the user friendly GUI, the suggested controller is applied to the X-Y stage which is made of two linear motors. Path following and repeatability performances are successfully observed, which shows the validity of the suggested controller.