Software that I believe you'll find helpful

Metapad: A  very nice text editor that works with large amounts of data
Xnview: A very nice graphics viewer that accepts  many graphic formats.
GnuPlot: A graphics plotting program that has 3-D options

Ubasic : A high precision parsed basic with complex algebra and graphics

GraphCal: An excellent graphics program particularly useful for its rapid 3-D functional plotting abilities
Mathtype: Useful for equation editing. Not free but Lyon College students can obtain licenses from IT for version 5.2
Mathtype Fonts: You will need these fonts to view my physics notes properly.
I have also mostly converted the text in the notes to DejaVU fonts which are open source and quite clear. You can get the DejaVU  fonts here.

Cute pdf writer: Print your documents from word to pdf (use the free version since it is free).

VRML Viewer

In order to make a bootable flash drive you might find UNetbootin useful.

If you want to get the latest from Puppy Linux, go here.

OpenOffice for windows is available here.

You might also want to know where to get STYX fonts. Go here to get them.

You sometimes want java. Here is where you can get that from.