enable – Trevweb

Enable Three Finger Drag in OS X 10.11 El Capitan

The gesture support in Mac OS X has been superb for many years. I recently had cause to set-up a new Mac and was confounded by the lack of three-finger drag support in the Track Pad settings. Three-finger drag on a track pad is my preferred setting.

I eventually found the setting, tucked away in Accessibility under System Preferences. Upon activating Accessibility, scroll to the ‘Interacting’ group from the list on the left. Select ‘Mouse & Trackpad’, click ‘Trackpad Options…’ and check ‘Enable dragging’. Lastly, select ‘three finger drag’ from the list.

Enable Three Finger Drag under Accessibility — Settings/Accessibility houses the Mouse & Trackpad preferences pane.

I can never figure out why these things have to change, but they do.

Disabling Root User on Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS

Root is often disabled by default when Ubuntu is installed. However, you might find it active when Ubuntu (or other Linux distribution) is deployed in automated environments E.g. when installed with a Virtual Private Server (VPS).

To disable root and administer the system from other user accounts, consider setting up sudo. As root, add a user to sudo that can execute commands as root:

$ sudo adduser trevor sudo

Note that you should replace trevor with a username on your system. Exit the shell as root and login with the username that you just added to sudo (or any other pre-configured sudoer). Use sudo to disable the root password, thus disabling login.

$ sudo passwd -dl root

Enabling Root

If you are in a circumstance where you need to enable the root account, type the following while logged in as a sudoer:

$ sudo passwd root

You will be prompted to enter and confirm the password for root.

Enabling Root

Further Reading