Successful Debian install...Now what?

[Zachary Kline]

Hiya,
    I'm not quite sure whether I should worry about rolling my own kernel as I used to do with Gentoo, or if I can get the Speakup-modified kernels from somewhere.  At any rate, though, I've been able to get the system up and working via SSH--not the most reliable thing in the world, but it's better than nothing.
Any advice for how to get Speakup and friends working with it?  (I know I'll need speech-dispatcher and speechd-up, as well as espeak.)
Thanks much in advance,
Zack.