I don't have mine set up to go to sleep when idle, and rarely run on battery. I suppose you could set up a simple shell script to use acpi to poll battery level every minute or so, then hibernate when it goes below a certain level. pm-utils is meant to be run as root, but you can set up sudo to allow certain commands without passwords. You can set it up with visudo to allow members of group "users", say, to use any of a list of commands by using the sudo command but without entering a password.

Using visudo I put in this:
and:
My ratpoison rudeness setting is 5, which only allows focus stealing by pop-up windows from the current application. I don't currently use anything that creates notifications, but when I have they pop up in the background.

For the slow desktop env, if you don't mind a different way of doing things (tiling manager) and a little bit of customization through config file, i3 (www.i3wm.org) is a good alternative.

Also AWM would be just as great :d

Ok, so my system is up and running. A bit laggy with xfce4 on youtube but bareable. The only thing that bugs me still is the fact that after each reboot, alsa decides to mute and lower the Main Master volume and i have to manually unmute and raise the volume each time i open my computer.
Any thoughts?

When you are satisfied with the sound settings type as root:See the man page to know more.

I always put this line in /etc/rc.d/rc.local_shutdown, so it will remember what I set in previous boot.