Getting and Running Ollama

00:00 To install Ollama, go to the download page on its website at ollama.com/download.

00:07 Then select your operating system. For now, let’s look at Mac and Windows, and then we’ll discuss Linux in a bit. If you’re on Mac or Windows, there’s an installer that downloads a desktop application.

00:19 As of this recording, the minimum requirements for the installers are macOS 14 Sonoma for Mac and Windows 10 for Windows. Once downloaded, follow the on-screen instructions using the default settings.

00:33 Once you’ve gone through the installer, you can start the Ollama desktop application.

00:40 Then you can just start chatting. To select a model, on the bottom right, click it and open up the dropdown, and then the models that still need to be downloaded are going to have this little download symbol on the right.

00:55 There are lots more models out there, and we’ll look at installing or downloading those models in the next lesson.

01:03 Now, if you’re on Linux, there is no installer or desktop application. You’re going to install Ollama using the provided curl command in the terminal.

01:14 You should now be able to run Ollama through the command line or terminal on Mac, Windows, and Linux. To confirm that it’s installed, you can run ollama -v to get the version number.

01:28 Then just ollama to run the command-line interface and start chatting with a model or open up various other tools. Now, if that command doesn’t quite work, you can run the server using ollama serve.

01:45 On Linux, this is going to be required for certain distributions because the server doesn’t start automatically. If you’re on Mac or Windows and ollama on the command line doesn’t work, try to open up the desktop application first to start the server.

02:01 If you try running ollama serve and you get this error that the address is already in use, that means that your server is already running. Make sure you can access Ollama through the command line before proceeding.

02:13 If you’re having any problems or want more specific software or hardware requirements, visit the docs at docs.ollama.com. It has specific sections for Mac, Windows, and Linux, with system requirements and troubleshooting help.

02:30 In the next lesson, you’re going to download the models required for the code examples.