The packages available to ubuntu (largely thanks to debian) are the best and most comprehensive of any distribution I've ever run.  This means less source compiling, and less dependency reconciliation.  Point in case: installing NodeJS on ClearOS is a lot harder than it should be all because Clear's repositories host an outdated version of python, which makes the configure process for NodeJS fail with syntax errors.

To get around this, we must do the following:

1) Install an updated version of python by building from source.

make altinstall above puts python in /usr/local (rather than /usr), which should avoid conflict with the existing version.

2) Fix the NodeJS configure script.

  I tried this: export PYTHON=/usr/local/bin/python2.7

....but it failed.  I didn't care to investigate why.  Just change the shebang line (the first line) in the configure script to #!/usr/local/bin/python2.7

3) NOW you can configure, make && make install NodeJS.