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The Model Context Protocol has gone from proposal to de facto standard for connecting editors with external tools. This practical guide walks through standing up a local MCP server, wiring it into VS Code or your client of choice, and understanding exactly what you are exposing.
Ollama makes it trivial to run models like Llama 2 or Mistral on your own computer: one binary, one command, and quantised weights downloading to disk with no compilation required. Covers installation on macOS, Linux, and Windows with an honest look at what local inference can and cannot do compared to frontier models.
To install Docker on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, add Docker's official repository instead of using Ubuntu's packages, then install Docker Engine: the dockerd daemon, the command-line client, and the Compose and Buildx plugins. The repository line needs a GPG key stored under /etc/apt/keyrings, because apt-key add is retired on 24.04, and it carries the noble codename from /etc/os-release.
Docker Compose is Docker's official tool for defining and running multi-container applications with a YAML file: one command spins up every service, network, and volume it describes. On Ubuntu 20.04 it is installed by downloading the standalone binary from GitHub, though Docker recommends moving to the v2 CLI plugin, since v1 is no longer maintained.
To install Docker on Ubuntu 20.04, add Docker's own repository (not Ubuntu's, which tends to lag behind), import its GPG key, install the docker-ce package, and add your user to the docker group so you can run containers without sudo. Running docker run hello-world at the end confirms the daemon works.
