Hi Peter,
Node can be a bit tricky sometimes when it comes to installing dependencies. This page about troubleshooting npm has always been very helpful for me to resolve these types of issues:
https://github.com/npm/npm/wiki/Troubleshooting
The most important sections (the ones I end up using the most to resolve npm issues) are "Try clearing the npm cache" and "Permission Error" (however, I don't advise npm install using sudo, which the "Permission Error" suggests as one possible fix).
I think the issue you were seeing where it kept running the last "fsevents" may have been caused by an npm caching issue, and I'm hoping that running npm cache clean -f will get you past that.
Please run / have your team member try running the following:
sudo chown -R $USER $HOME/.npm
sudo chown -R $USER /usr/local/lib/node_modules
sudo chmod -R a+w /usr/bin
npm cache clean -f
npm install gulp -g
npm install lithium-sdk -g
If the install still fails, you can try one more thing:
npm cache clean -f
npm install lithium-sdk -g --force
Finally, if the install is still failing, can you run the following and paste the entire output (you can skip some of the output of the npm install lithium-sdk -g --force command, but please include where it starts giving errors that it doesn't seem to recover from) in a reply to this thread?:
node -v npm -v
npm ls -g lithium-sdk --depth=0
npm cache clean -f
npm install lithium-sdk -g --force
I should hopefully be able to advise based on that output.
Thanks for your patience on this. Node can be a bit frustrating at times, but once we get you past this hurdle then things should hopefully run a lot smoother for you.
We are also looking into a VM-based solution which uses Virtualbox.
-Doug