Orca Not Working For Some Reason On Skywave Linux

[Glenn K0LNY]

Hi All,
I'm hoping some of you might have some ideas for me to try getting Orca going on Skywave Linux.
https://skywavelinux.com/
Skywave Linux is an image of Ubuntu with the mate desktop and i3 window manager, whatever that is.
Here's what it reads on that page about that:
"Skywave Linux is a 64 bit system, built on a base of 
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS,
uses the MATE Desktop and i3 Window Manager. It is the additional digital signal processing, networking, and signal decoding applications that set Skywave
Linux apart from its original base software."

When I installed onto a thumb drive, I got as far as getting espeak to say something, but spd-say hasn't worked.
This is on a VmWare session.
I've done apt update and apt install gnome-orca and apt install speech-dispatcher and apt install alsa-base pulseaudio and apt install speakup.
Of course I used sudo  and I did them successively, when I couldn't get anything else to work, I would try one, and test for TTS, and then try the next, and so on.
The command speaker-test -c 2 
does give me the white sound, so I know that the speakers aren't muted.
Also,
I'm wondering if this distro has removed a repository that might be needed for my installs.
When I was doing all this on the thumb drive, I was able to SSH into it from my Raspberry PI and I heard it reading out something about some things not in this repository.
Would it be a bad idea to add a main repository where all the packages I need to get it talking are located?
If there is a chance, what is the repository where I can get either all that Orca needs, or regular Ubuntu packages?
Since I'm doing all this without feedback, I am hoping it won't be too long a command for the repository.
The VmWare install so far has not opened itself to SSH, so that is why I have to do this without speech output.
I've done the sudo add-apt-repository command in the past, so I'm somewhat familiar with adding a repository.
Thanks for any help.

Glenn
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-accessibility/attachments/20210126/ef4ccb81/attachment.html>