Node != Nodejs

Recently built a new Ubuntu 10 VM to test out a few Node.js ideas. While support for windows is improving, it just isn’t ready for prime time. I’m very much a linux noob so I just tried following the various guides out there.

I’ve followed these steps successfully recently so it came as a surprise when running:

   1:  neil@ubuntu:~$ cd node

   2:  neil@ubuntu:~/node$ ./configure

resulted in:

   1:  neil@ubuntu:~/node$ ./configure: 4: autoconf: not found

(or some other such error)

Now trying to brute my way through the install I pushed on and ran:

   1:  neil@ubuntu:~/node$ make

   2:  neil@ubuntu:~/node$ sudo make install

furthers errors ensued…

However then running:

   1:  neil@ubuntu:~/node$ node

gave me the oh so informative:

   1:  The program 'node' is currently not installed.  You can install it by typing:

   2:  sudo apt-get install node

DO NOT RUN sudo apt-get install node

As this will install the node module. Confused? Well node != nodejs. node is apparently a Amateur Packet Radio Node program. Not what we want unless you’re into ham radios… Attempting to run node will usually result in something along the lines of:

   1:  axconfig: port 1 not active 

   2:  axconfig: port 2 not active 

 

How to fix all this? Well thanks to stack-overflow and the nodejs group at least I knew where to start:

First remove the node package:

   1:  sudo apt-get remove --purge node

   2:  sudo apt-get clean

 

And then run the following to get a stable version of nodeJS running (e.g. v0.2.4):

   1:  sudo apt-get install build-essential

   2:  cd node

   3:  git checkout v0.2.4

   4:  ./configure

   5:  make

   6:  sudo make install

 

You should now be able to run nodeJS scripts. YMMV