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Comment by coder543 | Hacker News Reader

I am somewhat surprised that this app doesn't seem to offer any way to connect to a remote Ollama instance. The most powerful computer I own isn't necessarily the one I'm running the GUI on.

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This. This. A thousand times this. I hate Windows / MacOS but love their desktops. I love Linux / BSD but hate their desktops. So my most expensive most powerful workstation is always a headless Linux machine that I ssh into from a Windows or MacOS toy computer. Unfortunately most developers do not understand this. Every time I run a command in the terminal and it tries to open a browser tab without printing the URL, it makes me want to scream and shout and retire from tech forever to be a plumber.

You can replace the xdg-open command (or whichever command is used on your linux system) with your own. Just program it to fire over the url to a waiting socket on your windows box, and have it automatically open there. The details are pretty easy to work out, and the result will be seamless.

I usually do this with a port forward (ip or Unix socket) over SSH. This way my server just sends data to ~/.tunnel/socket, and my SSH connection handles getting it to my client.

(It’s a bit more complicated with starting a listening server in my laptop, making sure the port forwarded file doesn’t exist, etc, but this is the basic idea.)

Hey Justine! Thank you for all your fantastic work

Thanks!

I can recommend to spend a day finding and configuring a window manager that suits your needs.

This was my thought. Given the huge range of desktop environments and window managers available there has to be one that suits you.

Probably one that suits you pretty much out of the box.

I doubt that she spent the time to create a cross platform C compiler library but didn't bother trying out a few Linux desktops.

I doubt that there is no wm that suits their needs.

Or just display the URL in terminal. I spent 5 years of my life ricing my Linux machine to get it as I want it to be only to realise that, at least for my needs and likes, nothing matches MacOS’s DE, compositor and font rendering.

Not a bash on Linux desktop users, just my experience.

You can work around this by using SSH port forwarding (ssh -L 11434:localhost:11434 user@remote) to connect to a remote Ollama instance, though native support would definitely be better.

Wait, it already connects over the network, it just doesn't let you specify the hostname? That's really surprising to me.

This is a feature we are looking into supporting. Thank you for reaffirming the need.

But it seems like the GUI already connects over the network, no? In that case, why do you need to do user research for adding what is basically a command line option, at its simplest? It would probably take less time to add that than to write the comment.

They will have to support auth if they are adding support for connecting with remote host. It's not difficult but it's not as trivial as you suggested.

Ollama server already supports authentication, and URLs already have a place for credentials.

The app does have a function to expose Ollama to the network, so perhaps its coming?

It's definitely coming, there is no way they would leave such an important feature on the table. My guess is they are waiting so they can announce connections to their own servers.

I use ollama via the llm plugin: https://github.com/taketwo/llm-ollama?tab=readme-ov-file#oll...

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