Wanting to learn more about node.js, I grabbed the latest stable branch of the source code and tried to install it on my Ubuntu 10.04 dev box. Simply doing a ./configure returned the following:

nali@nali-desktop:~/dev/nodejs/node-v0.2.6$ ./configure
Checking for program g++ or c++          : not found 
Checking for program icpc                : not found 
Checking for program c++                 : not found 
/home/nali/dev/nodejs/node-v0.2.6/wscript:138: error: could not configure a cxx compiler!

Oh oops, no compiler has been installed. There are a couple different ways to proceed: (1) either install only the packages needed, or (2) wuss out and install build-essentials which will load all the necessary packages and some extra ones for general development. I prefer to wuss out, so I do:

nali@nali-desktop:~/dev/nodejs/node-v0.2.6$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

After all that installs, I try ./configure again, only to get:

Checking for program g++ or c++          : /usr/bin/g++ 
Checking for program cpp                 : /usr/bin/cpp 
Checking for program ar                  : /usr/bin/ar 
Checking for program ranlib              : /usr/bin/ranlib 
Checking for g++                         : ok  
Checking for program gcc or cc           : /usr/bin/gcc 
Checking for program ar                  : /usr/bin/ar 
Checking for program ranlib              : /usr/bin/ranlib 
Checking for gcc                         : ok  
Checking for library dl                  : yes 
Checking for openssl                     : not found 
Checking for function SSL_library_init   : not found 
Checking for header openssl/crypto.h     : not found 
/home/nali/dev/nodejs/node-v0.2.6/wscript:195: error: Could not autodetect OpenSSL support. Make sure OpenSSL development packages are installed. Use configure --without-ssl to disable this message.

Bah, the SSL packages haven’t been installed yet. Do a:

nali@nali-desktop:~/dev/nodejs/node-v0.2.6$ sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

And then you can do a ‘make; sudo make install; make test’ to get it all running.