FAQ

How is ViTables licensed?

It has a GPLv3 license.

Oops! I've got a problem. How can I get support?

It's always worth to check the messages posted to the ViTables users' group: searching the list is a great way to get your questions answered. You can search the list using its web interface or from the Gmane interface. If you don't find an answer to your question I strongly recommended you to subscribe to the users' group and ask for help there. Probably some subscriber (ViTables developer or user) will be able to help you.

I've found a bug or I want to request a new feature. What should I do?

You should report it, of course :-). Please, send your report with the bug tracker.

How can I use the latest revision from the git repository?

If you want to run the development version of ViTables, first of all you have to clone it from the git repository. For instance

$ git clone https://github.com/uvemas/ViTables.git vitables_tip

will download the latest revision and put it in the vitables_tip directory. You can use it as is or you can build the ViTables package from sources and install it. Although packaging is not difficult it can be tricky because you may need to install the Sphinx documentation system. So packaging is not recommended. Instead, from the top level directory do the following

$ cp scripts/start.py run_vitables.py
$ python run_vitables.py

and ViTables should start. Beware that the HTML User's Guide will not be available unless you build it before running ViTables.

Are there graphical installers for Windows and Mac OS X platforms?

No, there aren't.

But can I launch ViTables from my Desktop?

Of course, you can. After installation, just create a Desktop shortcut as you usually do on your platform. Make sure that it points to the vitables executable. The only tricky thing is to give a nice icon to the shortcut.

On Windows the icon file is icons\vitables.ico and can be located in the installation folder.

On Linux it is a bit more difficult because the icons are not included in the package (tarball or wheel). So you have to download them from the repository. In particular you need the unixapp folder. There you will find the required .desktop file and icons (.png files) of several sizes. With all that stuff just follow the standard way for creating Desktop shortcuts on Linux. That's all.

If you have problems with the shortcut creation there are lots of tutorials in the Internet, like this for Windows or this for Ubuntu Linux.

Can I use ViTables with Anaconda3?

Yes. The easiest way is to install the ViTables package from conda-forge channel:

(Anaconda3) > conda install -c conda-forge vitables

If this fails, you can install ViTables from the PyPi repo. Please notice that, as stated in the conda User guide:

Issues may arise when using conda and pip together. When combining conda and pip it is best to use an isolated conda environment. Only after conda has been used to install as many packages as possible should pip be used to install any remaining software.

So the following should work:

(Anaconda3) > conda create --name vitables pytables pyqt
(Anaconda3) > conda activate vitables
(vitables) > pip install ViTables

If it still fails, download the tarball, uncompress it and proceed as you would do in a typical installation from sources:

(Anaconda3) > conda create --name vitables pytables pyqt
(Anaconda3) > conda activate vitables
(vitables) > python setup.py install