I recently installed Slackware current (Dec 05), and now find my usb Epson CX5200 multifunction printer/scanner is not being found by scanimage.

sane-find-scanner (run as both root and regular user) finds the scanner correctly:
But scanimage -L (run as both root and regular user) fails to detect the scanner. I tried both under the huge-smp 2.6.23.9 kernel, and my custom compiled 2.6.23.9 kernel.

I compiled and installed the epkowa/iscan driver, but that fails in the same fashion. I also tried unloading the usblp kernel module, then running scanimage. Nada...

Trying "xsane epson:libusb:001:002" also fails with the message:
"failed to open device: 'epson:libusb:001:002'. Operation not supported".

This printer/scanner has functioned perfectly with Slack 10 and 11 under 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, and works fine in Archlinux running the same versions of kernel, libusb, and sane.

This is a custom install, so I suspect I might be missing some crucial library package, but I did install most packages under the "l" and "d" subdirectories. Looking through the MANIFEST doesn't suggest any missing packages to me. Any ideas out there?

Fixed. I needed to install libgphoto2 for sane to find this scanner. Solution found by examining the output of strace scanimage -L.