Yes to the chroot question..

KDE and Gnome both have sound.. the default Gnome Sound Mixer does not work but using alsaplayer, GMPC, or Mpd will still produce sound.. at least for me. I get that same error in Gnome's mixer I just remove it - it's useless till I can figure out how to get it to talk to the esd/sound devices. But just because the mixer doesn't work doesn't mean sound doesn't work.. you just have to use the applications that do work with what sound we have available.

Also the System Sounds are disabled by default in Gnome.. you have to go into the properties and manually select "ALSA" as the input type and click on "Test".. you should hear sound.. however I never really got a gnome window to produce a "system" sound. But music worked.

So far, and by far, the best is MPD.