GRML: Loss of speech after upgrade?

[Zachary Kline]

Hello,
    I was able to successfully install GRML to the hard disk using Lilo as a bootloader.  After that, I managed to boot into GRML and get software speech.  I noticed that for some reason I couldn't just do a make menuconfig on the kernel sources already provided in /usr/src/linux, so I did aptitude update and aptitude install grml.  The system said that I had the latest version already, which made sense since GRML 1.0 was only released a relatively few days ago.
    When I did aptitude upgrade, however, I noticed some 150 or more packages that it said would be upgraded.  Is this normally the pace of unstable?
    When I upgraded them, and rebooted, I got no speechand seemingly no network connection either, which leads me to believe that the kernel might have panicked, or otherwise malfunctioned.  I didn't touch anything else in the system, and yet for some reason I couldn't get speech after a routine upgrade.  I wasn't expecting a hundred and fifty packages...
Any advice here?
Thanks,
Zack.