Debian Alsa

[Zachary Kline]

Hiya,
    While I was finally able to get my Dectalk Express to work properly and provide hardware synthesis for Speakup, I've noticed that Alsa seems to enjoy being a real pain to configure on Debian.  For some reason, when I've booted, I've noticed that /dev/mixer, among other things, isn't being created.  I would think that Udev could do that?  Not to mention /dev/dsp and all...
    Is there something fairly simple I'm missing?
Thanks,
Zack.