DeepSeek Deployment

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This document demonstrates how to deploy DeepSeek locally on the Quectel Pi M1 smart mainboard.

DeepSeek is a high-performance open-source large language model developed by a Chinese team. It offers strong capabilities in natural language understanding, code generation, and logical reasoning, runs efficiently in local environments, and is well suited for use cases such as intelligent Q&A, text generation, and code assistance.

Prerequisites

1. The Debian system on the Quectel Pi M1 has been successfully flashed and booted;

2. The system can access the external network.

Update Software Sources

Run the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Before installing software, it is recommended to update the system packages to ensure dependencies are at the latest versions.

Install Basic Tools

sudo apt install curl

curl is a common command-line download tool that will be used when installing Ollama later. If the system indicates that curl is already installed, you can skip this step directly.

Install Ollama

Ollama is a lightweight model runtime environment that can deploy and run various open-source models locally.

Run the following command in the terminal:

curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh

Start the Ollama Service

Ollama requires a server process running in the background to manage models.

Open a terminal and execute the following command:

export OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0:11435
ollama serve

This terminal window must remain open.

Run the DeepSeek Model

Open another terminal window and run the following command in it to pull and start the DeepSeek-R1 1.5B model:

ollama run deepseek-r1:1.5b

You can enter text in the red box area to start a conversation, for example:

FAQ

Download error: ERROR: This version requires zstd for extraction. Please install zstd and try again:

# Manually install the zstd library
apt update 
apt install zstd

After running ollama serve, you see: bash: ollama: command not found

# Clean up old remnants first
rm -rf /lib/ollama 
rm -f /bin/ollama /usr/bin/ollama 
rm -f /etc/systemd/system/ollama.service

# Download the package to disk first, do not pipe
curl -L https://ollama.com/download/ollama-linux-arm64.tar.zst -o /tmp/ollama.tar.zst

# Manually extract
tar -I zstd -x -f /tmp/ollama.tar.zst -C /usr

ls -la /usr/bin/ollama 

ollama --version