Re: Speech going out during installation
On Tue, 18 Nov 2025, K0LNY ?? wrote:
So, sometimes, using VmWare, during the installation of Debian, using the talking installer, the voice goes out.
First, there is a Debian bug filed against the installer for this issue:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1024549
In my opinion, this is almost certainly the espeakup dying bug which was
introduced in Bookworm which has been discussed at length on this list.
This issue has been reported by people using VMWare.
Here's a link to one of my more recent posts on the subject from the big
discussion thread on it:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-accessibility/2025/08/msg00044.html
In my experience at least, the espeakup process hangs and I have to kill
it to get speech back.
There also seems to be a bug filed against the espeakup project on this at
https://github.com/linux-speakup/espeakup/issues/45
Is there some sort of escape sequence/way to step away to recall the TTS?
It's been a little while since I installed a Debian system, but here's
what I would try.
First, I would prepare a console for running commands to get speech back,
before your speech actually dies.
If I remember correctly, the text mode installer runs on console 1. There
may or may not be a log window on console 2 (I can't remember if it still
does this), with Busybox shells available for activation on consoles 3 and
4 (please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this).
Assuming this is all correct, you should be able to alt-f3 or alt-f4
(using the left alt key), where it will prompt you to press enter for a
shell. Do this.
Now you have a console ready to switch to if your speech dies.
Now there is the question of actually getting your speech back.
If the bug is the same as the one I and others are experiencing on
installed systems, espeakup is hanging and needs to be killed. Some
mechanism reloads it after it gets killed, which brings speech back.
To kill it, I run:
killall -9 espeakup
Note that I've found that I need to use the -9 switch (SIGKILL) to
actually kill the process.
killall is in the psmisc package, which I don't think is installed by
default and therefore may not be available in the installer shell.
If it isn't, try seeing if you have pidof by running:
pidof espeakup
If you do this while espeakup is working, you should get back the PID of
espeakup.
You should then be able to run:
kill -9 `pidof espeakup`
to kill espeakup.
If the accents don't work in Busybox and you need to give kill the actual
PID without using tricks like this, but pidof is still available, you can
get the PID by running pidof and then running kill with it.
Example:
# pidof espeakup
179388
# kill -9 179388
If you need to run pidof after speech dies, you can still pipe output to
espeak-ng so that it speaks the output, like so:
pidof espeakup |espeak-ng
This is a very nice way to debug things without speech.
If you don't have pidof, you may need to run something like:
ps aux |grep espeakup
to get the PID. Again, you can pipe the output to espeak-ng if you need
to run this without speech.
You can probably use one of the many output formatting options to make it
much less chatty so it only gives you the info you want, I've not really
looked into this.
On my installed system, killing espeakup automatically reloads it which
brings speech back.
However, it's possible that in the installer, espeakup might not
automatically reload. Also, the person who reported the Debian installer
bug seemed to say that espeakup actually dies, rather than hangs.
Either way, you may need to restart espeakup manually.
On my system, the following command is used to launch espeakup:
espeakup --default-voice=en
So if espeakup dies instead of hanging or if killing it doesn't restart it
automatically, try running this.
HTH,
Geoff.
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