So something slipped in and changed the state of the camera's PTP state so that everything but going to "rec" mode works? If I go do a ps -A and kill everything but core stuff ( that will be fun to figure out ) should I be able to get past that? Is it a user level app or something that's hooked at the kernel level?
As I tried to explain several times, most modern linuxes have stuff that runs as soon as you plug something into USB. This includes kernel and userspace components. The userspace components are likely to be invoked only when the actual plugin event happens, so randomly killing daemons would not necessarily prevent it.
This is something that could be investigated and proven or disproven by someone who has one of the affected systems.
Its not clear that things worked immediately prior to the upgrade and stopped working immediately after the upgrade.
I am 100% (ok, 99.999%) certain this has nothing to do with IUP. This can easily be verified by building without IUP support. (IUP_SUPPORT=0 in config.mk)
Given that it still works on windows and still works on my linux systems, this strongly suggests something specific to your particular linux configuration.
If this is triggered by a change in CHDK or chdkptp, then reverting to an old version (from about the time we implemented live view for the G10) should be a good way to check that. But I see no mechanism for changes in either to cause the observed behavior, while I have seen similar behavior triggered by meddling OSes.
edit: live view was merged in trunk 1921, the corresponding chdkptp revision is 253