TBP uses glide by default for all Human fighters.
To enable glide for all other fighters in TBP ( or FSO for that matter ) you have to set the
$Glide: Yes flag in the table entry of each ship.
To do that you'll need a VP editor ( for TBP is Maya recomended, although i'm not sure if it will work with non-Windows systems ), extract the ships.tbl and modify it with a text editor like notepad.
Here's the link to the Wiki entry:
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Ships.tbl#.24Glide:
EDIT: Just checked, Maya is a multiplatform tool, should work on your system. Here's the link:
http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.67