xscreensaver-gl-helper command not found

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

xscreensaver-gl-helper: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: xscreensaver-gl-helper: command not found

Solutions to xscreensaver-gl-helper: command not found

How To Fix xscreensaver-gl-helper: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu xscreensaver-gl-helper is provided by xscreensaver-gl package.

xscreensaver-gl is:

XScreenSaver is a modular screen saver and locker for X11, containing more than 200 screen savers.

This package contains a small selection of 3D (OpenGL) screen saver modules from the xscreensaver collection. This package can be used by xscreensaver and also some other screensaver engines.

This is the set of GL screensavers shipped by default: antinspect, antspotlight, atunnel, beats, blinkbox, bubble3d, circuit, cityring, covid19, crumbler, cubestack, cubestorm, cubetwist, discoball, dymaxionmap, endgame, energystream, engine, esper, etruscanvenus, flipflop, flipscreen3d, flyingtoasters, gears, geodesic, geodesicgears, gflux, gibson, glblur, glcells, gleidescope, glknots, glmatrix, glschool, glslideshow, glsnake, gltext, headroom, hexstrut, hydrostat, hypertorus, jigglypuff, kaleidocycle, lavalite, lockward, maze3d, mirrorblob, moebius, moebiusgears, molecule, morph3d, peepers, pipes, polyhedra, polytopes, projectiveplane, pulsar, quasicrystal, queens, raverhoop, razzledazzle, romanboy, sierpinski3d, sonar, sphereeversion, spheremonics, splitflap, splodesic, stonerview, superquadrics, topblock, unicrud, vigilance, voronoi, winduprobot.

More display modes can be found in the xscreensaver-data, xscreensaver-data-extra and xscreensaver-gl-extra packages.

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install xscreensaver-gl

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install xscreensaver-gl.

sudo apt -y install xscreensaver-gl

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install xscreensaver-gl

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix xscreensaver-gl-helper command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.