Dogtail recorder does not start, SPI Exception

[ilogue]

On 11.10, it seems there is no Assistive Technologies setting to enable. Dogtail-recorder, when run from commandline, outputs:

dogtail-recorder
Creating logfile at /home/jasper/dogtail/logs/dogtail-recorder_20120619-164601_debug ...

** (process:2020): WARNING **: AT_SPI_REGISTRY was not started at session startup.

** (process:2020): WARNING **: Could not locate registry
Detecting distribution: Ubuntu (or derived distribution)

(dogtail-recorder:2020): Bonobo-CRITICAL **: bonobo_unknown_ping: assertion `object != NULL' failed

** (dogtail-recorder:2020): WARNING **: AT_SPI_REGISTRY was not started at session startup.

** (dogtail-recorder:2020): WARNING **: Could not locate registry
Warning: AT-SPI error: pre method check: add: Unknown CORBA exception id: 'IDL:omg.org/CORBA/INV_OBJREF:1.0'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/dogtail-recorder", line 11, in <module>
    import dogtail.tree
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/dogtail/tree.py", line 1247, in <module>
    root = Root (atspi.registry.getDesktop ())
  File "pyspi.pyx", line 195, in atspi.Registry.getDesktop
  File "pyspi.pyx", line 152, in atspi.exception_handler
SpiException: Non-fatal SPIException: type:0 source:0 "IDL:omg.org/CORBA/INV_OBJREF:1.0"

[Patrick Hendrickx (patrick-hendrickx1)]

Experiencing exactly the same problem on Ubuntu 12.04

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Patrick Hendrickx (patrick-hendrickx1)]

The ubuntu repositories contain dogtail version 0.6.1, which is geared towards gnome2.
For gnome3 compatibility, you need to manually upgrade to dogtail 0.8.0.

This is how I upgraded:
1. Remove old dogtail version by typing:
    sudo apt-get purge dogtail-python
2. Install new dependency:
    sudo apt-get install python-omniorb
3. Get the dogtail 0.8.0 tarball from https://fedorahosted.org/released/dogtail/ and expand it in a temporary directory.
4. Change to the directory where you expanded the tarball and run the install script:
    sudo python ./setup.py install --prefix=/usr/local