I met same problem when run it on a centOS5 linux server as CI job, with phantomJS 1.7 (I compiled it by myself)
Running "jasmine" task
Testing jasmine specs via phantom
...
[D] ["phantomjs","onResourceReceived","GET
http://127.0.0.1:8888/test/spec/CommonTest.js"]
[D] ["phantomjs","onError","ReferenceError: Can't find variable: describe", [{"file":"http://127.0.0.1:8888/test/spec/CommonTest.js","line":31,"function":""}]]
ReferenceError: Can't find variable: describe
...
the specs run successfully on other machine such as WinXP etc.
At last, it’s caused by that: I created a symbolic link for “node_modules” to re-use common module, but it preventgrunt-jasmine-runner to fetch sth. (not sure yet). To resolve it, need to copy the “node_modules” files directly under project folder.