Since I wanted to run a nodejs site on a small Ubuntu machine, without any compile tools installed, I had two options: pre compile it and try to transfer it binary, or see if someone already did this. Browsing for a solution for the latter I came across this launchpad page.

All in all it's as simple as:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
sudo apt-get update
sudo aptitude install nodejs

The only thing to note, is that the executable it installs is called nodejs, so I made a softlink as follows:

cd /usr/bin
ln -s nodejs node

All done!