I made fresh install of Ubuntu to test Nodejs in linux platform. For people curios about what Nodejs is, check this out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodejs. I picked Ubuntu since it is widely available and is free. This guide will be quick and for the purpose as my future reference. This series code of taken from gist: 579814 and additional code from stackoverflow to prevent the error that I also I encountered regarding Node.js could not configure a cxx compiler.
mkdir ~/local echo 'export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc . ~/.bashrc sudo apt-get install build-essential sudo apt-get install libssl-dev git clone git://github.com/joyent/node.git cd node ./configure --prefix=~/local make install cd .. git clone git://github.com/isaacs/npm.git cd npm make install
Hope this help you as it helps me.