Epson 1200U and Sane - not quite

[Ian Melnick <dazed@vonsteuben.cps.k12.il.us>]

Hello, all

I have an Epson Perfection 1200U scanner. I used mknod to make the
scanner0 device node in /dev/usb as noted in the documentation, and I
turn it on. xsane can't find any scanner devices, so I run
sane-find-scanner and it finds it just fine. So I run scanimage -L but
it can't find anything. So I run scanimage -d epson:/dev/usb/scanner0,
and the light on the scanner blinks for a sec and then nothing happens.
After a few minutes I get a message on the console:
kilusb_control/bulk_msg: timeout ... but the program doesn't quit. Why
is this happening, and what should I do to get it to work? According to
the docs, this model has been "supported" for a while.

Thanks