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.