Starting with laravel on ubuntu

Question

I'm trying laravel as a PHP framework, I have already extracted the laravel zip into ~/opt/xampp/htdocs/laravel but when I go to localhost/laravel or localhost/laravel I get a 403 error message saying:

Access forbidden!

You don't have permission to access the requested object. It is either read-protected or not readable by the server.

I read somewhere that I need to edit the storage folder inside of laravel so it can be readable and writable so I chmod -R 766 laravel/storage but still no luck, I'm doing this from Ubuntu 12.04 have anyone encountered this ?

EDIT
I have chmod -R 0+w laravel/storage and now when i go to localhost/laravel i get an index of some files in there, but when i go to localhost/laravel/public/ still get the 403 error, instead of the expected result

EDIT 2
I have set chmod -R 765 laravel/public and now when i get to localhost/laravel/public i get this message which leads me to believe i'm getting closer:

Warning: require(/opt/lampp/htdocs/learning-laravel/laravel/laravel.php): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /opt/lampp/htdocs/learning-laravel/public/index.php on line 34

Fatal error: require(): Failed opening required '/opt/lampp/htdocs/learning-laravel/laravel/laravel.php' (include_path='.:/opt/lampp/lib/php') in /opt/lampp/htdocs/learning-laravel/public/index.php on line 34

Answer 1

Final Update
I finally solved it, what happened was that the laravel folder was read protected, what i had to do was to set chmod 755 -R laravel and then chmod -R o+w storage and voila i had laravel up and running, thanks to everybody that contributed.

Answer 2

for just getting start with laravel, I just do these following steps:

sudo chmod -R 770 /your/path/to/laravel/folder/ 

then add www-data group to your laravel

sudo chgrp -R www-data /your/path/to/laravel/folder/