The Getting started instructions are a good start (no surprise there!) but are somewhat incomplete and currently look a bit outdated (I plan to fix them soon): however, the outcome has been that I have struggled more than I felt necessary in building and running Mesos on a dev VM (Ubuntu 14.04 running under VirtualBox).
Some of the issue seem to arise from the unfortunate combination of Mesos Master trying to guess its own IP address, the VM being (obviously) non-DNS resolvable and, eventually, the Slave and the Framework failing to properly communicate with the Master.
In the process of solving this, I ended up automating all the dependencies installation, building and running the framework; I have then broken it down into the following modules to make it easier to run only parts of the process.