Xampp delivered PHP and Curl not visible to the rest of Ubun

[vincej]

I have installed a recent copy of XAMPP on Ubuntu 14.04. I can see that PHP is enabled as I can do a Localhost and see through phpinfo() that Curl is enabled.

So, I want to now install Composer for Laravel development

However, when I issue this command:
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
I get the following error messages:

The program 'curl' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install curl

The program 'php' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install php5-cli

So what gives, how do I make my implementation of curl and PHP not "visible" to the Ubuntu Kernal ?
Thanks !