Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure most distros have node.js (albeit an older version) in their repos. I know Ubuntu has it for years now.
Well, I just tried to install it on Debian squeezy, but I couldn't find a nodejs package.
Here is the binary for debian
https://github.com/nodesource/distributions
Usually i install from source
wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.31/node-v0.10.31.tar.gz
tar -zxvf node-v0.10.31.tar.gz
cd node-v0.10.31
./configure
make ; sudo make install