Hello,

I am running Debian on my desktop and laptop, and I will try an help. I have a couple questions that might get us closer to a solution. During the install, did you choose a graphical environment, and if so which one? Also, did you check to see if your sound-card is muted.

I am surprised you don't have speech after an install. I have installed Debian on three computers, and the install has worked flawlessly so far.

Best of luck, and let me know if you get it working.

you won't get audio over SSH, at least I never did, I think what you would have to do is install X to go, which, I wish I could help you on that, but I've never done it so I can't.  If you use the VM directly hmm. Well, I've never installed Debian, I have done Ubuntu and arch before though, if Debian comes with speakup, which, I kind of doubt, but if it comes with it, most of the time it will be set up to beep and stuff, so one way to verify speakup is running is to hit backspace on the command line and if it beeps, speakup is running, but something else is wrong. As far as I know, speakup needs 3 things to run, eSpeakup, which is a package that allows interfacing between speakup and eSpeak, speech dispatcher, and speechd-up, which interfaces speech-dispatcher with speakup. If the installation had alsa, you can try alsamixer on the shell, and press up arrow, progressively going through, up arrow a bunch of times, and right then up and up and so on until you hear something. You've got some steps ahead to figure what this is. Speakup itself will always run because the kernel will load the modules at startup, and sooner if you have it patched into the kernel.