If you want to have Drupal installed on your machine (for building/testing offline) this tutorial will get you through it with no problems*.

*if you already have mysql and apache2 installed on your machine and running, xampp won't be able to start it's own mysql and apache so if you get some errors about that while starting xampp run:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

and then start xampp again.

If you have a better solution please let me know :)