Actually, I finally did manage to get gphoto2 to detect my camera. The problem was that the /dev directory in the chroot directory didn't have entries for the usb camera (or the usb adapter in host mode, I'm not sure which). Once I did that I can run gphoto2 -L (or -P) once with no problem. However the second command always causes the tablet to reboot. I just tried with a clean installation of the latest release of OS2008 (with becomeroot as the only package installed) and I'm getting the same results. So there's either something wrong with the OS2008 kernel, something inherently wrong with two different applications (using different libraries) trying to access the same USB port.

If someone wants to try the chroot environment that Dormant found, after doing a few apt-get install commands you will reach a point where you'll have to remove a key package and type in the phrase "Yes, do as I say!". This is fine AS LONG AS YOU ARE INSIDE THE CHROOT JAIL. The worst thing that can happen is that you'd break the armel-root-fs directory and have to unpack it again. I did such an update/upgrade and the chroot jail still worked fine. I believe I installed, joe, bash, & some of the networking utilities that I mentioned before to get to that point.

I might try to download the NSLU2 version of gphoto2 to see if that makes any difference. Actually, could someone point me to a link for that? Thanks.