As you may have seen, I bought an Epson Perfection 1260 on Monday.  I got 
the thing scanning yesterday, and decided to post what I had to do here in 
case it might save someone else grief later on.

First thing to do, is grab the latest sane source.  As of this writing, 
it's at 1.0.11.  The website is: http://www.mostang.com/sane/

If you've got a scanner other then the 1260, check the compatability list, 
it might be on there.

You'll need to get the sane-backends, sane-frontends, and if you like 
scanning with a GUI frontend, Xsane.  Build packages following the 
instructions.  Everything will end up under /usr/local.

Grab the iscan package from Epson in Japan.  The website is: 
http://www.epkowa.co.jp/english/linux_e/linux.html

Follow the link for ImageSCAN! for Linux. Then follow the download link.  
You'll need to tell them which product you're using and give them an email 
address.  Grab the latest iscan package, currently iscan-1.5.0.  If you 
get the rpm, install it with the --nodeps option.  It worked for me, 
anyways.

Once sane and iscan are installed, you'll need to find the lib file 
libsane-epsonkw.so.1.0.6, again that's the number of the current version.  
Copy it to your /usr/local/lib/sane directory.

In /usr/local/lib/sane, make a backup copy of libsane-epson.so.1.0.11, 
then remove the original.  Make a symlink from libsane-epsonkw.so.1.0.6 to 
libsane-epson.so.1.0.11.

Now, go to /usr/local/etc/sane.d.  Edit dll.conf so that there's only two 
entries, net and epson.

Next, edit epson.conf and make sure that the line /dev/usb/scanner0 is not 
commented. Everything else should be.

At this point, cd over to /etc and open up modules.conf.  Add the two 
lines:
alias char-major-180 scanner
options scanner vendor=0x04b8 product=0x011d

Save and exit.

Open up ld.so.conf and add /usr/local/lib, save and exit.

Check to make sure that /dev/usb/scanner0 is there, a character device, 
and has the proper permissions.  If not, mknod /dev/usb/scanner0 c 180 48, 
then set permissions.

At this point you can attempt to:
 # modprobe scanner vendor=0x04b8 product=0x011d

Then cat /proc/bus/usb/devices and make sure your scanner shows up. When 
in doubt, grep the output for Epson. If it's there, cat 
/proc/bus/usb/drivers and look for 48- 63: usbscanner.  If you've got 
that, you're almost there.  If not, reboot.  Hey, you're adding hardware 
here.  Check again when it comes back up.

Run sane-find-scanner (/usr/local/bin/sane-find-scanner, if you'd 
forgotten).  It should tell you you've got a scanner at /dev/usb/scanner0.  
If not, you can run it verbose (-v, and you can add more -v's to get the 
desired level of verbosity) and look at the error messages to help get you 
started on troubleshooting.

Should sane-find-scanner work, even if it's the first time, run scanimage 
-L, your output should look like: 
device `epson:/dev/usb/scanner0' is a Epson GT-7300 flatbed scanner

Yes, that's normal.  You're done.  Happy scanning!

Many thanks to google, the SANE project, and Epson Kowa.