Ubuntu ships with a particular version of OGRE that can be installed easily. For example, on Ubuntu 16.04:
$ sudo apt install libogre-1.9-dev
However, if you need to use an older or newer version of OGRE then you might need to build it yourself. This is not so hard on Linux, as it is on Windows.
$ sudo apt install build-essential automake libtool libfreetype6-dev libfreeimage-dev libzzip-dev libxrandr-dev libxaw7-dev freeglut3-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libpoco-dev libtbb-dev doxygen libcppunit-dev
Download the OGRE version you want as a ZIP file from its Mercurial repository on Bitbucket here.
Unzip the file and build OGRE:
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
/usr/local/lib/OGRE
:$ sudo make install
Tried with: OGRE 1.8 and Ubuntu 16.04