Comment 2 for bug 1700963

I'm using Ubuntu 17.10 and this still seems to be an issue. vitables 2.1-1 included with Ubuntu 17.10 is incompatible with the pytables 3.3.0.

Specifically, trying to open any file will result in a call to tables.isHDF5File. See this file here. /usr/share/vitables/vitables/h5db/dbsTreeModel.py

But isHDF5File is deprecated in pytables 3.3.0 and is now named is_hdf5_file.

https://github.com/PyTables/PyTables/blob/6782047b9223897fd59ff4967d71d7fdfb474f16/tables/scripts/pt2to3.py

Consequently, vitables fails to verify whether a file is an HDF5 file and won't open it.

I believe to make vitables working again you need to switch to vitables 3.0. In the current state, it doesn't seem like vitables can open any hdf5 file.