yesterday late evening I realised that I probably had a copy of libreadline.so on my SL-C860, so I copied it over.
then I needed libncurses, so I copied that over. gphoto2 then ran, giving me help.
then I plugged in my wife's (shh! secret Xmas present) Ixus 750, and dmesg reported that the 6000 found it
so ran gphoto ran, didn't find the camera, didn't have time to fix it.
I will see about extracing the two library sets and making an ipkg of them.