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.