There is really nothing to installing Ollama on your personal device. I have it running on several different devices and while it is slower on some it has worked with all of the smaller LLM’s available.
| Type | CPU | RAM | # of Cores | Year |
| MacBook Pro | i9 – 2.3GHz | 16GB | 8 cores | 2018 |
| MacBook Pro | M3 Max | 36GB | 30 cores | 2024 |
| Ubuntu 24.04 | i5 – 2.40GHz | 32GB | 8 cores | 2020 |
Of course the M3 is faster and can handle anything I throw at it, but the others although a bit slower still give a response on most tasks.
To install Ollama on your machine visit https://ollama.com/ and press the Download button.
From here it will take you too the download page where you can choose your operating system. The Windows version is still in Preview and I have not downloaded and installed it at this time.
For Linux:
There are additional instructions for installing on Linux here.
For MAC:
For Windows:
Following these instructions will get you up and running with Ollama. Keep in mind Ollama is a terminal application and you will probably want to use some kind of application to access the power of Ollama and we will cover that in the next installment of this series.
To use Ollama as it is installed just open your terminal and type :
ollama run llama3This will start Ollama and give you a prompt to ask it a question.
Then ask it a question.
From there you can start your conversation. But that is just the beginning. We cover more as we go on. Good luck with your install and see you next time.