apt - npm unresponsive after nodejs install on fresh Ubuntu 12.04.5

Here's where I'm at...

I have an old chromebook that I put Ubuntu (and Xfce) on via crouton. After installing the chromium browser, I installed nodejs via apt-get. I found that when trying to install yeoman, my node version was too old (v0.6).

So, I removed nodejs and npm:

sudo apt-get remove npm
sudo apt-get remove nodejs
sudo apt-get autoremove

Then followed the instructions here: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager#debian-and-ubuntu-based-linux-distributions:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup | sudo bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

After installing nodejs, I can run nodejs --version to see the node version is v0.10.36.

Then, when I run npm --version, I get no output at all.

After countless attempts with various approaches, this is what finally worked!

https://gist.github.com/csturtz/11f79e6bd0a05eaca6df