I'm slowly working on integrating gulp into my workflow for a lot of projects and Ubuntu comes with an older version of Node.js (I'm guessing most distros do) and I wanted to have a more current version on my VMs. The process is actually very straight forward:

cd ~
wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.12.0/node-v0.12.0.tar.gz
tar -xzvf node-v0.12.0.tar.gz
cd node-v0.12.0
./configure
make
sudo make install

We want to make sure that we're using the same version on all our VMs so we saved this process as a script so we could make sure we're using the same version.

If you want to upgrade to a newer version make sure you delete your existing install first. We found it caused random problems if we didn't:

rm -r bin/node bin/node-waf include/node lib/node lib/pkgconfig/nodejs.pc share/man/man1/node.1