At Arch Linux ARM one of our developers has been maintaining Node.js packages for ARMv5+ for a while now, they should work on any distro if you don't want to go to the trouble of compiling yourself or don't want to use Arch.

They're just tarballs, unpack them and move the files if needed.

http://archlinuxarm.org/arm/community/nodejs-0.6.15-1.1-arm....

http://archlinuxarm.org/arm/community/v8-3.9.9-1-arm.pkg.tar...

We also have full Raspberry Pi support as another of our developers has had a test board for quite a while, so if you're looking for something simple but powerful, it's a good choice :)

http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/raspberry-pi