This Week in TUXEDO OS #34-2025 - TUXEDO Computers

Hello TUXEDO Fans and Open-Source Enthusiasts!

Our developer penguins have launched a new challenge: Whoever finds the quirkiest fact about penguins gets to decide what’s on the menu for a whole week! Did you know that penguins lose all their feathers at once during a „catastrophic molt,“ need to go to the bathroom every 20 minutes, or that a group of swimming tuxes is called a „raft“? This week, we’re also covering KTorrent, the versatile KDE BitTorrent client, and Spectacle with OCR, which lets you automatically extract text from screenshots and images.

Enjoy reading,
The TUXEDO OS Team

KDE App of the Week: KTorrent BitTorrent Client

This week we present KTorrent, the standard torrent client of the KDE community. The application is based on the BitTorrent protocol and proves especially useful when downloading large files such as Linux ISOs – whether for testing, installing, or for the penguin species of distro hoppers who are constantly in need of fresh supply.

What is a Torrent?

Many distributions, including TUXEDO with its in-house TUXEDO OS, offer their images not only as a direct download but also as a torrent. First, you download a small torrent file of just a few kilobytes, which you then open in KTorrent. The actual download is then distributed across many sources at the same time. This approach usually provides higher speeds, relieves the distributors’ servers, and makes the download more resilient to outages.

Because torrents work in a decentralized manner, the file remains available even if individual sources go offline. While torrents can raise legal issues when associated with copyrighted material, their use for downloading Linux distributions or other freely accessible media is completely safe.

Usage

KTorrent comes preinstalled with TUXEDO OS. All you need is the torrent file, which you can find on our download page behind the question mark icon. After downloading, simply open it in KTorrent and the download begins. In the settings, it’s worth selecting a suitable directory for completed downloads beforehand and adjusting the network options if needed.

Once the image is fully downloaded, it’s best to leave the program open so you can help distribute it to other users – after all, the peer-to-peer principle works both ways.

Features

Beyond simple downloading, KTorrent offers a wide range of useful features. These include a web interface for browser-based control, flexible bandwidth management with scheduling, support for magnet links, trackerless torrents via distributed hash tables, and the option to selectively download individual files from a torrent. Protocol encryption and numerous management options are also available, making the application a versatile tool even for advanced users.

Further Use Cases

KTorrent is available not only on Linux but also for BSD, macOS, and Windows. In addition to open-source projects, universities, research institutions, and companies also use torrents to efficiently distribute large data sets and make them accessible to many users at the same time.

TUXEDO OS Tips & Tricks: OCR Text Recognition in Spectacle

From smartphones we’re familiar with the ability to take photos of signs or instructions and extract the text using OCR (optical character recognition) or modern AI tools. This allows you to quickly translate content or reuse it in other programs. On the desktop, this technology often still feels underdeveloped – yet the necessary building blocks, such as the OCR engine Tesseract, have long been available in Linux package sources. They just need to be combined.

This is exactly what the script spectacle-ocr by Kaloian Kozlev does, which he recently introduced on his blog. It extends KDE’s screenshot tool Spectacle with a handy feature: Extract Text. With just one click, you can extract text directly from a screenshot. Kaloian published his script on GitHub along with a simple installation routine that also works under TUXEDO OS. Open a terminal and enter the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/kbkozlev/spectacle-ocr.git
cd spectacle-ocr
bash setup.sh

After installation, open any image – whether it’s a PDF in the document viewer or a photo in an image editor. Then start Spectacle from the application menu or with the Print key, select the desired section of the image containing the text to be digitized, click Export, and choose Extract Text.

After a short processing time, you’ll receive the recognized text directly in your clipboard and can paste it into any program such as LibreOffice Writer or a text editor with Ctrl+V or Paste. The feature works reliably under both Wayland and X11. In Kate, you can reformat the text block into clean continuous text with Ctrl+J.

If spectacle-ocr doesn’t suit your needs, you can remove it with just a few commands. The previously installed packages such as Tesseract or ImageMagick remain on the system but take up very little disk space:

rm -f ~/.local/share/applications/spectacle-ocr.desktop
update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications || true
rm -f ~/.local/bin/ocr.sh

Ubuntu Security Updates

The security updates listed here from Ubuntu are directly integrated into TUXEDO OS:

• USN-7703–2: Linux kernel vulnerabilities: Several security issues were fixed in the Linux kernel.
  IDs: CVE-2025–21855, CVE-2025–21773, CVE-2024–58086 + 67 others
  Affects: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
• USN-7699–2: Linux kernel (HWE) vulnerabilities: Several security issues were fixed in the Linux kernel.
  IDs: CVE-2025–38019, CVE-2025–38009, CVE-2025–37947 + 56 others
  Affects: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
• USN-7708–1: poppler vulnerability: poppler could be made to denial of service if it received a specially crafted PDF file.
  IDs: CVE-2025–50420
  Affects: Ubuntu 25.04, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
• USN-7707–1: LibTIFF vulnerabilities: Several security issues were fixed in LibTIFF.
  IDs: CVE-2025–8176, CVE-2025–8177, CVE-2025–8851 + 1 other
  Affects: Ubuntu 25.04, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
• USN-7705–1: Tomcat vulnerabilities: Several security issues were fixed in Tomcat.
  IDs: CVE-2024–50379, CVE-2025–31650, CVE-2025–31651 + 3 others
  Affects: Ubuntu 25.04, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
• USN-7703–1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities: Several security issues were fixed in the Linux kernel.
  IDs: CVE-2025–21859, CVE-2024–52559, CVE-2025–21791 + 67 others
  Affects: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
• USN-7702–1: WebKitGTK vulnerabilities: Several security issues were fixed in WebKitGTK.
  IDs: CVE-2025–43227, CVE-2025–43216, CVE-2025–31273 + 7 others
  Affects: Ubuntu 25.04, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
• USN-7699–1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities: Several security issues were fixed in the Linux kernel.
  IDs: CVE-2025–38094, CVE-2025–37965, CVE-2025–37964 + 56 others
  Affects: Ubuntu 25.04, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
• LSN-0114–1: Kernel Live Patch Security Notice: Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.
  IDs: CVE-2022–49176, CVE-2023–52885, CVE-2022–49179 + 5 others
  Affects: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS