I've been trying to get this thing working for ages.

I've got an Epson Perfection 636U. From what webpages are telling me, it's fully supported... but with more research people with the same scanner are saying that the libusb upgrade broke the support. When I do sane-find-scanner, it gives me

found USB scanner (vendor=0x04b8 [EPSON], product=0x0101 [Perfection636]) at libusb:004:002

scanimage -L spits out

device `epson:libusb:004:002' is a Epson Perfection636 flatbed scanner

Okay... great. Now that I know that my scanner actually exists, I go to try xsane. After about a minute or so of (supposedly) detecting the scanner, I try to aquire a preview. After waiting about 45 seconds or so, an error message pops up:

Failed to start scanner: Error during device I/O.

Wonderful. So, the scanner exists but apparently it's incapable of communicating anything useful. I've tried all of these steps both as root and non-root.

System information: kernel 2.6.10-gentoo-r6
Pentium 4 2.4 GHz
512 MB DDR RAM
Gentoo

Can someone help me out here?

SUCCESS! ...sorta.

I reemerged (for people who don't use Gentoo, emerge is kinda like apt-get) xsane and now it works under root. Under a non-root user, it says "no devices detected", but I think I can fix it from here.

Whee!