I just fetched node with wget from http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.8.11/node-v0.8.11-linux-x86.tar.gz
I ran sudo tar -zxf node-v0.8.11-linux-x86.tar.gz and then cd'ed into node-v0.8.11-linux-x86. However the Configure file is not there, so when I run ./configure I get a no such file or directory error. What am I doing wrong?
You've downloaded a binary archive. With it, you should find node, npm, and node-waf already pre-compiled in the bin sub-directory.
If you want to build from source, you'll want to instead download: