Two programs stand out. The first discussed below works well for opening a folder of dicom images and browsing them. The second provides a different 3d view to move around a series of images (the second one crashes on single large images).
Best dicom viewer
Dicom viewer for Windows, Linux and Mac. From Sept 2012 article http://www.iheartubuntu.com/2012/09/linux-dicom-viewer.html there are many DICOM viewers for Ubuntu, but the reviewer preferred this, and it does seem to suit the bill:
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Ginkgo-cadx is definitely the program to use. But there is are quirks to using it that are easily overcome with a few hints.
Getting your images open
Open the program, click on the Acquire icon in the middle of the page and select “open folder”. Watch in the lowest right corner as it links or imports the images in your folder.
Now once that is done click on the “History” icon and there are your images, nicely arranged.
The program remembers your last history.
The history window
The history file manager does have a description column but it kinda disappears to the right of the window.
Right click on one of the histories and select open study to view the images.
Right click to select DICOM Inspector to view information like doctors, etc.
If you double click on one of the images (or if it is not a series, just the one image) you will open another window viewing the image with more controls.
The viewer window
Each opened study shows in a tab of the viewer.
Zoom in with the mouse wheel, move around the image by holding the right mouse button.
If there is a series of images you can use the mouse scroll wheel to move through them or you can use the slider at the bottom of the main image window to scroll through the images.
In the viewer you can select Menu/Series/Show (or Hide) Annotations — that will cause annotations to show in the four corners of the image.
There is an export image function as well – Menu/File/Export image – where you can select jpg, etc.
DICOM inspector is also found in the viewer under Menu/Tools.
If you click the x to close the viewer you will also close the history (better to use alt-tab to bounce between the viewer and the history).
If you click the x to close the history, the viewer will remain but only if there is a viewer already opened.
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3D dicom viewer
http://gdcm.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gdcm/files/gdcm%202.x/GDCM%202.6.2/
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Here are some notes on other programs that fall far short of ginkgo-cdx.
There is also this one that is quite old now but has been mentioned often
http://aeskulap.nongnu.org/index.html
Apparently IrfranView can open these, and here is the review of free DICOM viewers from May 2015 that says so
http://technologyadvice.com/medical/blog/5-dicom-viewers/
Otherwise, have some folks review the options on that page to see how they would be using the viewer.
Gimp apparently has a plugin.
Microdicom might work, it has no Linux versions but maybe it would work with Wine/PlayOnLinux
http://www.microdicom.com/downloads.html