Software and scanner for scanning photographic slides?

I've tested several scanner programs in Ubuntu and I think "gscan2pdf" is the best.

You can scan with ADF scanners (feeds the photos/sheets automatically), batch crop pages, set brighness/contrast (and more) before scanning (saves a lot of time), edit the pictures in GIMP or other external program, do OCR on text and more.

You can install it using the Ubuntu Program Central (or compile it from source: http://gscan2pdf.sourceforge.net/ )

For scanning slides and negatives, the best I've found is VueScan from Ed Hamrick of Hamrick.com. It's available for Linux, Windows, and Mac and supports MANY scanners with it's own drivers. Try the trial version to see if it works with your scanner (it puts watermarks on the scans, but at least you can see if it'll work for you).

Not Free (in either sense), but a substantially better value and better service than you get from most paid-for software.

I have just received a similar (branded OTEK Filmscanner FS500-2) scanner and also had trouble getting it to work (Windows 8 had no support for it but no surprises there). Vuescan also unfortunately didn't recognise it either. I did however manage to get it to work under Ubuntu 13.04 although it failed under 12.04.

lsusb gives me:

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 05a9:1550 OmniVision Technologies, Inc. VEHO Filmscanner

and I found that Cheese will capture photos from it as looking at syslog it appears to be treated as a USB Camera

 kernel: [  251.108071] usb 1-4: new high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci-pci
 kernel: [  251.241541] usb 1-4: New USB device found, idVendor=05a9, idProduct=1550
 kernel: [  251.241546] usb 1-4: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
 kernel: [  251.241549] usb 1-4: Product: USB Camera
 kernel: [  251.241552] usb 1-4: Manufacturer: FW-07.07.25
 prometheus mtp-probe: checking bus 1, device 4: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb1/1-4"
 mtp-probe: bus: 1, device: 4 was not an MTP device
 kernel: [  251.306084] Linux video capture interface: v2.00
 kernel: [  251.325134] gspca_main: v2.14.0 registered
 kernel: [  251.337586] gspca_main: ov534_9-2.14.0 probing 05a9:1550
 kernel: [  253.184436] usbcore: registered new interface driver ov534_9
 colord: Device added: sysfs-FW-07.07.25-USB_Camera

You can install cheese by:

sudo apt-get install cheese

But I am now looking for something that feels a little less 'cheesy' for scanning all those old family negatives (and the one filter that cheese seems to be missing is 'negative' so I can see what the photos actually look like while scanning them.