If you have a Dell Precision M6500 with a Synaptic TouchPad + TrackPoint) (rather than an ALPS version) and you are running Ubuntu 10.10 you may find the TrackPoint / TrackStick / Nipple is being detected as a standard PS/2 Generic Mouse and this is causing the movement to be very slow.
You can check this by typing:
xinput list
If you see something like this:
Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=11 [slave pointer (2)]
↳ PS/2 Generic Mouse id=12 [slave pointer (2)]
As you can see the TrackPoint is not listed and as such you wont see it in any of the configuration screens.
As I haven’t worked out how to get it to detect it as an actual TrackPoint the best solution I have is to change the acceleration mode to more closely represent what you would expect:
xinput set-prop "PS/2 Generic Mouse" "Device Accel Profile" 6
I then just add this to the startup applications for my profile.
Thanks so much for this! The slow trackpoint was driving me crazy. Have you figured out yet how to get Ubuntu to recognize it as a true trackpoint?
Not yet, I’ve also noticed that after some use the trackpoint seems slow down again but then returns to normal if I stop using for a little while.