hardware-OS configs (volume buttons, sleep mode...)
 

Curious how to get my volume buttons working, and also how to get into sleep mode.

That is dependent on the hardware that you are using. Usually you will need some sort of acpi user-space tool to control them. You can use acpid but it requires you do work and figure out what signal acpi is throwing out. Dependent on the distro that you are using it can be done several ways but the only way I am familiar with is using acpid.