I wouldn't think a guide like this would be needed but I ran into a weird issue (and its solution) while installing Bower. I figured I should document it for later.
This guide will probably work with any Ubuntu- or Debian-based distro. I can confirm that this works on Ubuntu-based Mint.
sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo apt-get install npm
sudo npm install bower -g
I ran into issues with running Bower after executing all of the above commands. It turns out there's an issue with NodeJS when it's installed via a package manager (apt, etc...). Namely, NodeJS is installed as 'nodejs', while Bower tries to invoke it by calling 'node'.
To fix it, create a symbolic link with the following command:
ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node
You should now be able to call NodeJS with node, and Bower should now function as expected.