Is there any image editing software that can open Microsoft DirectDraw Surface files in Ubuntu?

The good news is that the command line application ImageMagick can read, write and edit DDS (Microsoft Direct Draw Surface) files. Test your own copy of ImageMagick as follows:

andrew@ilium~$ identify -list format | grep 'Microsoft DirectDraw Surface'
      DDS* rw+   Microsoft DirectDraw Surface
     DXT1* rw+   Microsoft DirectDraw Surface
     DXT5* rw+   Microsoft DirectDraw Surface
andrew@ilium~$

The codes after DDS,DXT1 and DXT5 signify:

* native blob support
r read support
w write support
+ support for multiple images

And certainly on my system ImageMagick's convert utility easily produced the required DDS files and successfully converted DDS files to other formats such as jpg and png...

2019 Answer

Gimp 2.10 now supports DDS out of the box.

Have you tried XnViewMP? It's known to work on some dds files, but some read errors have been reported too. You can't find it in official repositories, but here: http://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/#downloads. Don't worry, it's free, paid version is for Windows only.