You can follow the following recipe to install Bower onto a recent Ubuntu installation:

apt-get install npm
npm install -g bower

Now you can try running bower

You may get the following error:

/usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory

This can be solved in using the following command:

ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node

This is because the Ubuntu package is called nodejs instead of node, which is what bower expects.

Happy bowering!