Hi Samuel: firstly speakup is working on the full dvd, so in the end I was able to use that, and updated from the net; our mirror is broken right now. Yes I could go into a secondary shell on the netinst and modprobe speakup_soft, then espeak, and sound came up. However it would appear that we were running the graphical installer, as going back to alt+f1 showed the usual messages when X starts. I'm out shortly, but will boot into that installer and issue the alsa commands and just flick them through shortly. I must have been redirected, for the iso was located at http://hammurabi.acc.umu.se/cdimage/wheezy_di_beta4/amd64/iso-cd/debian-wheezy-DI-b4-amd64-netinst.iso Cheers, thanks for the help; yes it should work. Marcel
