Node.js does work on the Dragonboard under Ubuntu, but there are no official packages (as of Oct 20, 2015) that support arm (specifically armv8). I believe that rasberrypi has a arm version, but it is armhf and doesnt seem to be the correct target.
Do not be confused with the v8 which is the javascript execution engine built for Google Chrome, and the ARM v8 which is the architecture that adds support for 64-bit.
The target that we are specifically looking for is arm64, which corresponds to aarch64
Binaries
It seems that since I last attempted this, there are now releases available for node, they can be found https://nodejs.org/dist/
Building
Steps to build the binary
Prerequisites
Install all the packages required
$ apt-get install git gcc g++ python2.7 build-essential
Setup git as needed
We're gonna store the source in /home/linaro/Documents
$ cd ~/Documents
$ git clone git@github:nodejs/node.git
$ cd node
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
Appendix
Adding sources for apt-get
apt-get lists are stored at /etc/apt/
Modify sources.list to have:
deb-src http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ vivid main universe
I created a new vivid.default.list to put in /etc/apt/sources.list.d to capture everything else
The contents of that file are:
# Main repo line
deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports vivid restricted
# Updates to the main line
deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports vivid-updates main restricted universe
# Newer software for older ubuntu releases
deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports vivid-backports main restricted universe
