Basics of tmux

Running Large Language Models (LLMs) locally and fine-tuning LLMs on a personal computer is a bit challenging. I am using the MacBook Air M4 16/256 GB (base variant). On this spec, I tried to run Ollama and LM Studio; the download and install process went smoothly, but when I tried to download and load open-source models, they barely ran. This pulled all the available storage on my RAM and froze my laptop; on top of this, my laptop heated up too much. For this reason, I was exploring some techniques to get my work done. Luckily, my university provides free servers to its students. I set up authentication, VPN, and remote SSH to connect to the server, and every process was going great. When I was using VS Code with remote SSH, I noticed a weird thing: whenever my laptop screen went off because of inactivity, the server connection broke. Again, I needed to re-run every process I had done before. In some heavy model training, models take hours or days to train, and then I was exploring alternatives to solve this issue. Today I found tmux, where we can run every process in a tmux session; tmux keeps the session active in the background even if I turn off my Mac, which turns very useful for me. Today, let's start with some basics of tmux.

Today's agenda:

• tmux Installation
• Start and Exit tmux
• Check the tmux sessions
• Create tmux session
• Attached tmux session
• Detach Tmux session
• Kill Tmux Session

tmux Installation

sudo apt update && sudo apt install tmux -y

Start and Exit tmux

Start tmux:

tmux

Exit tmux:

exit

Check the tmux sessions

tmux ls

Create tmux session

tmux new -s <myproject> # you can name any project

Attached tmux session

tmux attach -t <myproject> # here need to attach the same project to continue that session. 
#Use `$ tmux` ls to check all available tmux session.

Detach Tmux session

Press Ctrl + b, then d.

Kill Tmux Session

tmux kill-session -t myproject