Thinkpad already has both problems solved. Getting 12-14 hours on my thinkpad T420 with a 9 cell and a power script written to make all the items found "bad" by powertop2 turn to "good". Switched from x220 (which was getting roughly the same battery life) because its 1366x768 screen wasn't quite enough for on-the-go work.
As for the lid opening and closing doing what it's supposed to, it does. Coincidentally, the ACPI also works flawlessly on my wife's 5 year old Japanese Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
Edit: here's a link to a thread in which I described the steps I took to get great battery life out of my thinkpad T420. May need tweaking for different thinkpad models, but I used it on my x220 as well with only minimal changes:
Is it possible to get powertop2 on Linux Mint? I can't even find a source download; their alleged source repo at git.moblin.org seems to be down. Going to that domain gives me a "502 Bad Gateway" error.
As for the lid opening and closing doing what it's supposed to, it does. Coincidentally, the ACPI also works flawlessly on my wife's 5 year old Japanese Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
Edit: here's a link to a thread in which I described the steps I took to get great battery life out of my thinkpad T420. May need tweaking for different thinkpad models, but I used it on my x220 as well with only minimal changes:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3562267