Electron installation fails on Debian based distros. about electron-prebuilt

[maxrimue]

As it says node: not found, we can expect your system to not be affected by problems in case Node.js uses the command node, so, as a temporary solution, you could create an alias like this:

alias node='nodejs'

The alias will only be valid during that terminal session which means you're safe in case you'll ever have another program using node as its command. After setting the alias, install again, it should work after that without using an alias.

[TomWor]

The alias doesn't work. It seems the npm process spawns another process where the alias is not recognized?
Another thing that caught my eye: the node_modules folder is empty after the error.
If the post install script doesn't run, does the whole package get removed again?
Shouldn't it be in there?

That being said, of course this will fix the error:
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node
But you gotta keep an eye out for this conflict, but I don't think I need the other package that brings a node binary.

[maxrimue]

@TomWor Yeah, it's possible that npm spawns a process that is not affected by this way of aliasing. It could also be that npm deletes the dependency folder in node_modules/ if installation has failed, probably because you can't just resume the installation process if it has failed at some point, so it rather asks you to download it again (if not cached) and start the installation again from zero.

It's also possible that not every Debian user will even install the ax25-node package (or others using the node command), to be honest, node is a really bad name for a command since it's just as descriptive as webbrowser or something like that, maybe it'll even be changed in the future as Node.js is getting more popular everyday. On packages.debian.org, it is described like this:

The ax25-node program accepts TCP/IP and packet radio network connections and presents users with an interface that allows them to make gateway connections to remote hosts using a variety of amateur radio protocols.

Another way for making the alias available globally is to create the alias in your .bashrc file, but you can of course also use sudo ln -s.

[ungoldman]

I recommend trying out https://packages.debian.org/sid/nodejs-legacy, that seems to have worked for others having issues installing on different linux distros.

sudo apt-get install nodejs-legacy

See #27 (comment) for an example that resolved a similar issue. Marking this as resolved as it sounds like nodejs-legacy was made to deal with this issue.