Personal Drawing Board

I am a computer science major who has a lot of theoretical classes that involve a lot of math. I hate using pen and paper for scratch work because I keep on losing them so I am planning on getting a new bamboo input tablet so that I can do all the "scratch work" in an accessible format on my laptop. However, I am finding it hard locating an application in Linux that essentially acts as an accessible white board. All of the apps I look at are geared towards artists and so are not designed to accommodate my needs. Is there an app geared to people who have requirements like mine? P.S I already use latex but that is usually for work already done and thus not very effective for the things that I am still figuring out.