node.js conflicts: /sbin/node vs /usr/bin/node

Question

I have two Ubuntu 12.10 machines: machine A is a VMWare VM and machine B is and old Acer laptop. On both machines, I installed node using apt-get. However machine A installs the main binary as /usr/bin/node and machine B as /usr/bin/nodejs. Here are some behaviors I observed:

1. Both machine returns /usr/bin/node in response to the which node command. However, there is no such file on machine B.
2. Issuing the command node works for machine A, not B. On B, I have to use nodejs instead.
3. On B, there is a binary called /sbin/node, A does not have it.

These behaviors causes inconsistency problem when developing on both machines. For now, I worked around by renaming the binaries on B as such:

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

Is there a way to really fix this, so that node will be installed as /usr/bin/node instead of /usr/bin/nodejs?

Answer 1

Unfortunately for me, creating a symlink did not work. What did work for me though was creating an alias. In ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_aliases (if ~/.bashrc loads this file), just add the following line:

alias node="nodejs"

Restart your bash session by typing bash into the console and your alias will now work.