best ada integrated development environment

[Phil <philwebb@nospam.radiolink.net>]

Hi, i have been out of the ada stuff for a while and are just about to
embark on a project to simulate a blackjack card game using ada. 

I spent a few days researching languages
c/c++/pascal/python/java.....pro's and con's.....and chose ADA (yes i
want the static type checking)

About 10 Years ago i worked on a project on an embedded ada system on
unix box's. at the time scripts were used to compile/bind all
directories which had one package each in them - i did not set up the
scripts. Everything was pretty manual. Rational was around then  but i
did not use it.

Right now I am running suse 9.1, i use KDE and have installed kdevelop
3.1, obviously have gnat on machine. This is a hobby and hence i have
no budget. this kdevelop did crash a few times and was not that
intuitive. i spent enough time comparing languages......days..... and
now just want to get cracking...... i need a way to reasonably set up
10 or 15 packages so at least i can get coding but i don't want to be
working stone age like the Flintsones.  but before i get stuck in is
there a better one or should i just get going with this kdevelop in
the short term at least? 
 
Is there a clearly best free integrated development environment?

Is there a big difference between free and propriority IDE for the
small'ish project of mine? i did start this once before, again 10
years ago, using turbo pascal and it was 1200 lines, not all the
features or analysis i know i need so this could be 2000 to 3000 lines
i expect or maybe more. This time maybe interfacing to existing
statistics packages whether they be ADA or c such as general
scientific library which is in C.

I found a  sourceforge.net. adaproject - will this be useful?

any suggestions, since i have been out of it would be appreciated.

Phil