title: NPM appears to do nothing on Linux Mint 15
body: <p>searched, and did not see this specific problem.</p>
  
  <p>Trying to get a MEAN stack built on my Linux Mint machine, and bumping into a bit of an unusual issue.</p>
  
  <p>Got MongoDB installed, and finally got it running correctly (none of the instructions ANYWHERE mentioned having to create the /data/db/ directory and set permissions, go figure).... it works now.</p>
  
  <p>Got NodeJS installed, and it appears to work correctly.</p>
  
  <p>I had been told (apparently incorrectly) that NPM installs right alongside Node, with:</p>
  
  <pre><code>sudo apt-get install nodejs
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ npm
  bash: /usr/bin/npm: No such file or directory
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So I go ahead and install NPM separately.</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ sudo apt-get install npm
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Seems to work, so far, no errors, and it looks like it is pulling down the NPM package and installing it...</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ nodejs -v
  v0.10.21
  $ npm -v
  $
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>?? It simply fails to respond without any error... so I try:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ npm install grunt -g --save-dev
  $
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Same completely silent failure... in fact, NOTHING I could do gets a response out of NPM.</p>
  
  <p>Looked all over the web, and saw nothing similar anywhere... found out that NPM holds its cache files in ~/.npm and noticed that this folder didn't exist (kinda like the mongo issue above), so I created it, and set permissions to 7777... still nothing.</p>
  
  <p>Purged and re-installed both node and npm, tried installing them both together and separately (yes, desperation)... still no love.</p>
  
  <p>WTF am I doing wrong?</p>
  
  <p>I would love, eventually, to have a nice development environment setup, hopefully with Cloud9 as a local IDE.... but already pulling my hair out.</p>
  
  <p>=========================================================================================</p>
  
  <p>OK, after a few more headaches, this is up and built now... thank you all.</p>
  
  <p>Would love to mark both as answers, but it won't let me.</p>