Technical Setup Guide
Summary
A step-by-step guide for installing Ollama on an Apple Silicon Mac mini and deploying the Gemma 4 26B model with automatic startup, preloading, and keep‑alive configuration. It covers prerequisites, installation commands, model download, testing, and creating launch agents to maintain the model in memory.
Highlights
- Installs Ollama via Homebrew cask and verifies the service is running
- Pulls the 26‑billion‑parameter Gemma 4 model (~17 GB) and confirms GPU acceleration
- Creates a macOS launch agent to preload the model on system startup
- Configures environment variables to prevent automatic model unload
- Provides commands for testing the model and monitoring resource usage
auto-generated
Context
Audience
Developers and AI engineers who want to run Gemma 4 26B locally on Apple Silicon devices
DomainMachine Learning Operations
Formatmarkdown guide with code snippets
Accessfree online via Gist
Topics
Related
Ollama documentationApple MLX framework overviewMac mini hardware specificationsPrompt engineering for large language models