If bower complains about a missing node binary, do not install Ubuntu's node package.

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Instead, you need to create a symlink that points to the binary one of the nodejs package:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node

You probably already installed NodeJS. In case you did not:

sudo apt-get install nodejs

If you already installed the node Ubuntu package, bower will just do nothing (i.e. not show any input, or respond to any switches) and you need to uninstall that package first.