How I Got Ollama Running on My AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT Using WSL and ROCm

I wanted to start experimenting with AI for a while. At work, I didn't really have enough time to properly explore this new ecosystem and understand how these tools could be used. But I had another resource available: my personal hardware. I'm a gamer, so I have a reasonably powerful desktop PC. I'm also a developer, with a laptop running Ubuntu and a NAS. That made me wonder: Can I use my gaming PC to run AI models locally? The answer is yes . This article is a small walkthrough of my experience setting up a local AI environment using an AMD Radeon GPU , Windows , WSL , ROCm , and Ollama . My hardware is (yes, I'm Team Red): AMD Ryzen 7 5700X 32 GB RAM AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT with 16 GB VRAM Ubuntu 26.04 running under WSL Installing WSL and Ubuntu The first step is to make sure that WSL is installed and up to date. The general process is: Check your current WSL version. Update WSL. Install Ubuntu. Create your user account. Update the Ubuntu installation. WSL From PowerShell: # Check the current version of WSL wsl -v # Update WSL wsl --update # Install Ubuntu wsl --install -d Ubuntu # Start Ubuntu wsl -d Ubuntu # Stop Ubuntu wsl --terminate Ubuntu # Remove the Ubuntu distribution wsl --unregister Ubuntu Ubuntu Once Ubuntu is installed, update the system and install zstd . We will need it later to extract Ollama. sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade sudo apt autoclean sudo apt autoremove sudo apt install zstd Installing Ollama with ROCm support Ollama is the foundation of this setup. It allows us to download and run AI models locally while providing different compute backends, including CPU, CUDA, and ROCm. Installation One thing that wasn't immediately obvious to me was that Ollama provides a specific ROCm backend. The installation is split into two parts: Install Ollama. Install the ROCm backend. # Install Ollama curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/download/ollama-linux-amd64.tar.zst \ | sudo tar --zstd -x -C /usr # Install the ROCm backend curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/downlo