Can't disable suspend button

This bug also affects Ubuntu 11.10. And this has resulted in repeated system crashes as 11.10 will not survive hibernate/wake-up.

Instructions here don't work:
http://www.vyvy.org/main/en/node/219

And trying to define a custom key launcher in gnome keyboard settings don't work (you have to press the key to define it).

I have crashed the system a few times now trying to test if it is disabled.

You apparently can't disable it in /etc/default/acpi-support because if gnome-power daemon is running it ignores its own settings and sends the message there.

There was a time when I had linux system uptimes of over a year. Regression like this is not acceptable. Some people have gone as far as removing the suspend/hibernate options from the shutdown menu on systems where suspend/resume is unreliable. And some disable suspend buttons on critical systems that should never be allowed to suspend.

upowerd is running, but doesn't seem (from its documentation) to do anything actually useful, just engage in dbus masturbation.

you probably can't disable it in xmodkeymap since it is probably intercepted by acpi.

How many programs are involved in handling the keyboard power button? BIOS ACPI, acpid, X keymap, upowerd, dbus, gnome-power, gconf, pm-utils (on some distributions), powerdevil, pm-suspend, pm-hibernate, /etc/acpi/*, etc. And no documentation.

Trying:
sudo perl -p -i -n -e "s/acpi_fakekey/#acpi_fakekey/" /etc/acpi/sleepbtn.sh
Of course, when I test this, it will kill the web browser where I am posting this.

sleepbtn.sh change did not help.

Since software folks are busy indiscriminately breaking things and failing to respond to reports that things are broken, I am following the lead of the afforementioned sun conure (parrot) and taking a hardware approach: I performed a sleep-button-ectomy on the keyboard.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

I have two desktop systems that are not intended to ever go into sleep mode. The keyboards have the sleep key right near the escape key, and even no the screen, suspend and hibernate are too close to logout and lock screen, without and any confirmation, and typically about twenty minutes of work to recover. I think I toasted a raid device out of this. working on recovery.

fwiw, If you go into /usr/share/polkit-1/actions
vi *power*
and find
<allow_active>yes</allow_active>

and change them all to no...

<allow_active>no</allow_active>

Then your sleep button is disabled. This is incredibly poorly documented. I have no idea what ''allow_inactive'' means, or what any of the stanzas are trying to convey, or why we have 7 languages in those XML files (I could understand 1 or 150, it's the seven I don't get.... what about standard i18n?) apparently there was a GUI in fedora 11 or something, but it got removed, and there we are...

I have an idea about the meaning of "allow_active", "allow_inactive", etc. Since the policies are applied to users and sessions this should mean "active session", "inactive session". The value could also be auth_admin so it will ask you admin password to do the action.
Therefore if you change them all to no, the suspend action will be just disabled. Than what I found trying your solution. But what we really need is the possibility to change the behavior of the suspend button. At my keyboard it is located near the minus sign on the keypad and it is often pressed by inadvertence.

@Peter Silva:
Instead of editing the default rules, one should create local ones, as shown here for hibernate and suspend:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/94754/how-to-enable-hibernation-in-12-04/

I do agree that it's poorly documented though...