Hacker News Reader

Comment by ptrhvns | Hacker News Reader

FYI: the Linux installation script for Ollama works in the "standard" style for tooling these days:

    curl https://ollama.ai/install.sh | sh

However, that script asks for root-level privileges via sudo the last time I checked. So, if you want the tool, you may want to download the script and have a look at it, or modify it depending on your needs.

View on HN

They have manual install instructions [0], and judging by those, what it does is set up a SystemD service that automatically runs on startup. But if you're just looking to play around, I found that downloading [1], making it executable (chmod +x ollama-linux-amd64), and then running it, worked just fine. All without needing root.

[0] https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/docs/linux.md#man...

[1] https://ollama.ai/download/ollama-linux-amd64

The ollama binary goes into /usr/bin which it doesn't have to but it's convenient. I haven't checked what else needs root access.

we have package managers in this day and age, lol.

Sadly most of them kinda suck, especially for packagers.

Wrap it in homebrew and have ruby call out to sudo. Problem solved /s

https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

do package managers make promises that they only distribute code that's been audited to not pwn you? I'm not sure I see the difference if I decided I'm going to run someone's software whether I install it with sudo apt install vs sudo curl | bash

You are already trusting the maintainers of your distro by running Software they compiled, if you installed anything via the package manager. So it's about the number of people.

ok, so, I think i am trusting fewer people if I just run the bash script provided by the people whose software i want to run

This only applies to software distributed by your distro. For something as novel as Ollama, I severely doubt it's made it into anything other than the most bleeding edge(Arch and co). You'll have to wait a few years to get it into mainline Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. and of course it will be at a set version.

Debian considers this a feature. Choose a distro that fits your needs.

With reproducible builds you get to challenge the binaries provided by your distribution. See <https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Invoking-guix...> for an example.

thats really cool, thanks for the link

Well, there's things like:

https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#the...

The whole thing, actually:

https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/index.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com