I've been playing around with Ollama in a VM on my machine and it is really useful.

To get started I would start by making sure you have capable hardware. You will need recent hardware so that old computer you have laying around may not be enough. I created a VM on my laptop with KVM and gave it 8gb of ram and 12 cores.

Next, read the readme. You can find the Readme at the github repo

https://github.com/ollama/ollama

Once you run the install script you will need to download models. I would download Llama2, Mistral and LLava. As an example you can pull down llama2 with ollama pull llama2

Ollama models are available in the online repo. You can see all of them here: https://ollama.com/library

Once they are downloaded you need to setup openwebui. First, install docker. I am going to assume you already know how to do that. Once docker is installed pull and deploy open web UI with this command. Notice its a little different than the command in the open web UI docs. docker run -d --net=host -e OLLAMA_BASE_URL="http://localhost:11434 -v open-webui:/app/backend/data --name open-webui --restart always ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main

Notice that the networking is shared with the host. This is needed for the connection. I also am setting the environment variable in order to point open web UI to ollama.

Once that's done open up the host IP on port 8080 and create an account. Once that's done you should be all set.