Thanks to the alpha testers: Lorinda, Liesel, Kate, Karl, and James.
A host of open source software projects aided in the development of Madabar.
KWordQuiz is a flashcard editing/quiz program that inspired me to write Madabar. KWordQuiz is nice and simple, but I wanted something more flexible and extensible, and more amenable to the things I was trying to learn. (Note: None of the Madabar Vocab source code is derived from KWordQuiz.)
http://www.peterandlinda.com/kwordquiz
Python is a cross-platform, high-level, interpreted programming language. It is my language of choice for most tasks due to its clarity, simplicity, scalability, large module library and overall good design.
PyQt is a set of Python bindings for the Qt cross-platform toolkit.
http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pyqt
Qt is a well-designed cross platform toolkit, that provides the GUI libraries for Madabar. Unfortunately Qt 3 for Windows is not available under the GPL.
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt
The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) was used to generate the icons and other graphics in Madabar.
OpenOffice Writer was used for writing the HTML help files.
The code was written using the GNU Emacs text editor.
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html
The KDE desktop environment is fairly easy to use and looks nice.
Fedora is a Linux distribution that is reasonably easy to use, quick to install and has timely bugfix and security updates, and fairly up-to-date packages.
Linux is an operating system that is free and doesn't lock you in. Well – it does lock you into GPL if you want to modify it, but then there's always BSD...