Compiz as stand-alone + xfce4-panel : a few questions

Question

After some months with gnome 3 I decided to go back to compiz, as I used to use that with gnome 2.xx and appreciated it quite a bit. I ran into a few problems when trying to set it up properly.
First, is there some way to enable session management with compiz? I would like to be able to have a button or menu that offers to sleep, reboot or shutdown the computer. Not that I mind using 'pm-suspend' and other commands like that, but my girlfriend also uses the computer sometimes so it needs to be more user-friendly than that. I noticed there is an actions button by default in the xfce panel but it doesn't work in compiz and just says 'session management is disabled, do you want to exit X' or something like that.
Second, I need some sort of run prompt when I hit alt-f2. The 'gnome compatibility' option in ccsm doesn't seem to work in standalone mode.
Third, I want the computer to automatically sleep when I flip the lid. In gnome 3, it does that without any special configuration, but this doesn't work with compiz as a stand-alone. I suspect I need to configure it to pick up the 'lid is flipped' event somehow?
Fourth, I need a volume control option that will display a volume icon in my xfce4 panel notification area and most importantly I need that volume control icon to respond accurately to the input from my 'mute' and volume 'up' and 'down' buttons. It's a thinkpad x220 laptop. I bring it to school often, so being able to know whether my volume is on or off is important when in class. This works fine in gnome3 but I have tried other DE's such as LXDE and found that the volume icon stayed the same as I used the volume buttons on the keyboard (the buttons did work, so it could be muted but still displaying that it's at full volume). To check if it was muted or not, I had to open a terminal and use alsamixer.
Of course, I don't NEED to be using xfce4-panel. What I need is a menu, and automatic menu generation is nice because it's easier to configure. So I picked that one because I've used it in the past. If there is a better alternative, please recommend it. Or perhaps it would be best if I simply ran gnome fallback and compiz as the WM?

Answer 1

I'm using compiz standalone, so here's how i solved that stuff.
You can use obshutdown for session management, it's in AUR, look in its config file, slap a launcher in the corner of you panel, set the icon for prettyness and it works pretty well.
I use gmrun as a launcher, set alt+f2 to call it. It's pretty simple which is what i like. You can also use synapse, or gnome-do, they have more functionality like searching your bookmarks, your files, your loved one's medical history, you name it.
For volume control, you can use pnmixer from aur, it sits in your system tray, and you can set it's hotkeys, but you can also use CCSM to set your hotkeys for volume management.
I think laptop-tools(check the wiki) can be used to put your computer to sleep, and general powersaving. You should check the article named laptop in the wiki for other laptop-related stuff too. I think i used xfce4-power-manager for power management as well a while ago.
I used xfce4-panel for a while but i didn't really like it as much as i liked the old gnome-panel, so i installed mate-panel(which is the old gnome-panel). You can find it in AUR, or you can check it's wiki article for repos you can add for mate(if you want to install it from aur, it will pull some aur dependancies, and i didn't feel like compiling everything).