Installation issue: InvalidArchiveError with jupyterlab_widgets & A-scan warning

[Heloisa Moraes]

Dear gprMax community,

I am writing to share an issue I encountered while setting up the gprMax environment. Although I used a temporary workaround to complete the installation, I am reaching out to see if anyone else has faced this same problem and knows the proper way to solve it.

Before encountering this issue, I followed all the installation steps exactly as recommended in the https://docs.gprmax.com/en/latest/include_readme.html#installation. For context, my operating system is Windows 11 (25H2) 64-bit.

While running the standard conda env create -f conda_env.yml command, the installation repeatedly failed, returning an InvalidArchiveError. After investigating, I realized the error was tied to the download and extraction of two different archive formats of the same package:

1. The .conda file error: The process initially crashed while trying to extract jupyterlab_widgets-3.0.16-py314haa95532_1.conda. Assuming it was a local cache or Windows permission issue, I completely reinstalled Miniconda, cleared the cache, and ran the prompt as Administrator, but the error persisted.

2. The .tar.bz2 file error: To bypass the standard format, I configured Conda to strictly download the older, more stable format (conda config --set use_only_tar_bz2 true). However, the system threw the exact same InvalidArchiveError for the .tar.bz2 version of the file.

Because both file extensions failed consistently even on a clean install, I suspect there might be an issue with how my system interacts with the jupyterlab_widgets package from the repository, though I do not have the technical expertise to assert if it is a local extraction bug on my machine.

 After some research on the issue, I opted to bypass the conda_env.yml file entirely.  I manually created the gprMax environment by installing only the necessary scientific dependencies from the conda-forge channel:

conda create -n gprMax python=3.10 numpy scipy h5py cython matplotlib colorama tqdm terminaltables pip -c conda-forge -y

After doing this, I was able to activate the environment and successfully run python setup.py build and python setup.py install. The installation completed without any missing dependencies, and the software appears to be running successfully for my simulations for now.

However, I am currently facing a minor issue after the simulation. When I try to read the .out file for a single A-scan (using the command python -m tools.plot_Ascan user_models/cylinder_Ascan_2D.out), I get a UserWarning stating: 'Unable to import Axes3D. This may be due to multiple versions of Matplotlib being installed'.

Does anyone have any insights into what might have caused this initial installation loop, or how to properly fix this Matplotlib warning?

Best regards,

Heloisa