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I recently upgraded my desktop with a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GiB, and naturally, my first instinct was to put that VRAM to work by setting up local AI search.

I settled on Perplexica, an open-source AI-powered search which will be backed by Ollama for the inference. Since my daily driver is Fedora 43, I wanted to do this using Podman Rootless Quadlets rather than Docker Compose.

Here’s my guide on how to orchestrate Perplexica and Ollama using systemd and NVIDIA CDI on Fedora.

Fedora 35 Workstation

I’ve been using Mate since GNOME 2 was shelved, then tried out Cinnamon for a short while which I wasn’t that fond of at the time then briefly switched to LXDE. That didn’t rock my world so I jumped to XFCE which I really liked a lot while trying to get used to the new GNOME for a long time, almost every release of Fedora the new GNOME just didn’t cut it for my daily work. But now that Fedora 35 released and some positive changes been made over the years to GNOME so I decided let’s try it once again. To my surprise, seems to work really well with Wayland and nVidia on the new laptop from work it seems to me the integrated Intel graphics is used but when running 3D programs it uses the nVidia card and my Workstation at home works well with X11, I have to test this a bit more since on the work computer though. But initially it’s a smooth experience with Fedora 35, GNOME 41 and nVidia 495.44 drivers from RPM Fusion. It is however some things missing for me to use it as the daily desktop environment so let’s dive into it.

Fell i love with OpenWrt so I continued on and purchased a Zyxel GS1900-8HP which boasts 802.3af/802.3at (PoE/PoE+) and 802.1Q VLANs after a little research there seems to be a new PoE+ HAT for the Raspberry Pi 4, so I’ll still have to get my hands on one of those and an AP, but the old Asus RT-AC68U in AP Mode will have to suffice for now.

Notes

I’ll do some repeat of the previous article OpenWrt on Raspberry Pi 4 so that I have some notes here in-case I need them in the future.

Setup DDNS - Cloudflare

opkg update
# install, scripts and LuCI app + ca-certificates to enable SSL, required by Cloudflare
opkg install ddns-scripts-cloudflare luci-app-ddns ca-certificates

Head over to Cloudflare Dashboard

• Select your domain
• Click the ‘Get your API Token’
• Select the tab ‘API Tokens’
• Click ‘Create Token’ button
• Select template: ‘Edit zone DNS -> Use template’
• Include -> Specific Zone -> ’<your_domain>’
• Then hit ‘Continue to summary’
• Save the ‘API Token’ for later use
• Create an A record pointing to some IP address, we’ll use example ‘subdomain.example.com’

Log out of LuCI then log back in

Setup OpenWrt on Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, using OpenWrt current latest stable 21.02.0.

The plan

Current router is a Asus RT-AC68U Rev. E1 with the official stock image, I’ll be setting this up in AP Mode for the time being, I will however invest in a switch with POE (supporting 802.3af) and dot1q (802.1Q VLANs) with a Ubiquiti Access Point UniFi 6 Lite, use the Raspberry Pi 4 in a router on a stick inter-VLAN configuration getting rid of the USB->Ethernet dongle and power the Raspberry Pi 4 + UniFi AP 6 Lite through POE which I will get a POE HAT for the Raspberry Pi 4, but that’s for another article sometime in the future.