How to make the 'sleep' button work if yours doesn't

One small issue that I'd been having with Devuan Jessie since I first started using it last October was that the sleep button didn't do anything. The sleep button works fine in Debian Jessie, and I suspect that upower now expects some systemd component or other. BTW, this is an ancient (2008) Compaq Presario, Dual Pentium @ 2 GHz, 4 GB RAM rig. It runs beautifully.

Typing 'sudo pm-suspend' in a terminal worked fine, so I knew that the basic sleep functionality was there. At the suggestion of ralph.ronnquist in the Hardware and System Configuration forum I decided to see if I could come up with an acpi event handler to invoke a script to run pm-suspend.

First I wanted to confirm that the sleep button was indeed generating an acpi event, so I ran acpi_listen and pressed the sleep button. Sure enough, it showed 'button/sleep SBTN 00000080 00000000 K'.

Then I went to /etc/acpi/events to make a handler for this event. There was one there already for the power button (powerbtn-acpi-support), so I just copied and modified it for my sleep button, cleverly named 'sleepbtn-acpi-support', containing the following:

event=button[ /]sleep
action=/etc/acpi/sleepbtn-acpi-support.sh

Then I simply made the sleepbtn-acpi-support.sh script in /etc/acpi, to whit:

#!/bin/sh

# This script calls pm-suspend when the sleep button has been
# pressed.

	# Normal handling.
	/usr/sbin/pm-suspend

That's it. Reboot, or restart the acpi daemon, and voila! A press of the sleep button now sends my computer to sleep! I had the same issue with Devuan Ascii, and the same fix applies.

Of course, now you know how to make the sleep button do whatever you want ;-)