Not as far as I know. AsteriskNow uses Freepbx which does not support asterisk realtime. You can run it directly on Asterisk but I don’t think the GUI will recognize it.
Hmmm… Many Distro features are helpful, like the core setup (trunks), firewall, etc…
Since Asterisk Realtime can be enabled on a section by section bases… it is key items like Voicemail and users/devices that we want realtime… the rest can be local (FreePBX).