Ok, that's strange. Could you describe the problem you are having? Both of my computers have no keyboard issues, although, since the keyboard code was ported from Windows to GLUT, there definitely could be problems with it.

Pressing left and right arrow keys do nothing. On which distro have you tested it?

All testing so far has been done on Lubuntu Precise Pangolin and Ubuntu Maverick Meercat. However, the distribution should make no difference, as I know of no distribution that doesn't use the same combination of Mesa/Xorg/Xinput-drivers, except maybe some of the tiny distros that are still based on the 2.4 kernel series (DSL).
The left and right keys do not have any functionality during the menu, and also while the player is on the ground. A minimum test case for testing those keys would be navigating through the menu to some gameplay mode (Classic, Asteroids, or Targets; Using up and down keys), Selecting that mode (Return key), Leaving the ground (Up key), and then turning either left or right (left and right keys).
Also, it could be helpful to note if the problem is limited to the special keys, or if the problem is also apparent in the wasd keys as well (select classic mode)

Ok, the up key must be used first. But it's still very slow. Maybe you should make the program more configurable (at run time or by allowing command line arguments). I'm on Natty BTW.

What kind of configuration are you thinking of? Something like changing the key mappings? or something else?
Currently, entering a command line argument causes the game to jump into a network game with whatever IP address you entered on the command line, I would like to keep that on the command line even when I consider the game complete, however, I could easily parse other types of arguments if necessary, maybe change to a more GNU getopts argument style, if it was desirable.

Something like --speed=N (form slow to max speed) or anything that's interesting to tweak/test (although I don't know what.) BTW, the key mapping is ok.

I'm hesitant to allow users to configure the speed on runtime, things could get especially hairy in network games if players use different settings.
That being said, I am sure your speed issues are not a resources issue, the game uses very little resources (not even any textures, and sounds are less than 1000 bytes each), so your speed issues must be due to something wrong with my timing system. If you compile with the -DSLOPPYTIME flag, I think your problems will be resolved.
I like the idea of compile-time configuration better than runtime configuration, just from a stance of not wasting resources.

When compiling with -DSLOPPYTIME, I got errors. I could fix them but I still find the game not responsive enough on my box.

Do you have a windows version? I could give it a try on xp and see the original game behaviour.

There wasn't one besides the old outdated Windows version, but it took me like 5 minutes to cross compile a new executable. I had to disable the sound and network though. I don't have Windows on any of my machines, so note that these builds are not tested at all.
I just uploaded them to the website, there is a regular version and a sloppy timings version.
http://betteros.org/games/download.html

Unfortunately, there was some missing dll (libglut-0.dll) and when I finally could grab this one, it was still broken (bad version probably) so...

Oops, sorry about that. It should be fixed now, I compiled it statically so that it shouldn't depend on any dll's.
However, for reference, I used FreeGLUT instead of GLUT, although I thought they were binary compatible.
If you re-download, hopefully it will work.

I still got the same error (missing libglut-0.dll).

Interesting.... Cross compiling for Windows is weird.. I'll package my libglut-0.dll with the executable and upload it again soon.

Ok, I replaced the exe file on the download page with a zip file containing both executables and the dll needed to run them. Still not sure why the executables are linked to that dll, since I never even installed that dll in my toolchain...
http://betteros.org/games/download.html

I got a crash (bsod). For which version of windows is it compiled?

Maybe you should make a portable version including all required dll's to avoid that. Anyways, if you're cross-compiling, it's not that easy...