after way too much battling with obtuse software (vgetty appears to be quite poorly maintained, and the debian-packaged version is quite old), it should be the case that my computer will answer the phone now. there's still some work to be done, like hacking in some better caller-id usage, and turning the voice mails into emails. i have plans to do something more interesting with it than a plain-old answering machine, but one battle at a time. now i can at least cancel the voice mail from the phone company.