It's not *that* hard...
Presently, there are few pre-packaged installs, so the recommended method for most users is to follow these instructions. Even if you have a package system that includes freeglut, you may wish to manually install for a variety of reasons. A likely reason is simply that the latest version of freeglut may not have been packaged.
The following are simple UNIX instructions, see README.cmake in the freeglut
source distribution, for detailed instructions for your system.
First, you need to download a freeglut release. Newer is generally better, but unless you know what you're doing, you should use a release marked "Stable." So download the newest Stable release that you can. (On the other hand, if you discover a bug and want to report it, it is helpful to try to run the "current" freeglut, as we have been known to fix some bugs before they are reported.)
Copy the tarball you downloaded into a temporary directory. Untar it as follows:
tar xzvf freeglut-X.Y.Z.tar.gz
cd freeglut-X.Y.Z
mkdir build cd build
cmake ..
This is as simple as:
make sudo make install
This will install the libraries, headers, and symlinks to replace GLUT.
For more complete build instructions for all operating systems, please see README.cmake.
For Android, please see the dedicated Android page.
For BlackBerry support, please see README.blackberry in the project source code.
For OpenGL ES support (1.x and 2.x), please see the dedicated GLES page.