@Gunner I did it on my Raspberry PI Model B without mounting holes from 2012 - and it works.
run these commands and show your output:
uname -m
uname -a
cat /etc/os-release
cat /etc/debian_version
cat /proc/cpuinfo
echo $PATH
echo $NODE_PATH
node --version
npm -v
P.S. I did a clean install of 2017-01-11-raspbian-jessie, expanded image, enabled VNC and SSH if that can matter