root method

On your workstation:

copy your ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub file to /tmp/YourName.pub on the server. (The name of this file determines your gitolite username, so if you leave it as id_rsa.pub, your gitolite username will be id_rsa, which may not be what you want).

On your server, as root:

git clone git://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite
gitolite/src/gl-system-install
# defaults to being the same as:
# gitolite/src/gl-system-install /usr/local/bin /var/gitolite/conf /var/gitolite/hooks

# to upgrade gitolite, repeat the above commands.  Make sure you use the
# same arguments for the last command each time.

# now create your "hosting user" ('git' in our examples) using whatever
# command your distro expects you to use

# switch to the hosting user
su - git

# (now as git)
gl-setup /tmp/YourName.pub

Note: if you're running non-interactively (i.e., cannot tolerate an editor popping up), insert a "-q" before the argument to gl-setup.

On your workstation:

git clone git@server:gitolite-admin