Need help with USB.

My brother is in Lubbock and I'm here in NY. He has a new HP 1520n box which doesn't have a serial nor parallel port, just USB. Neither the Zoom external modem (internal is a winmodem) nor the printer (HP Laserjet that worked with SUSE, old release) are seen by 10.1. I can't get hands on with that box and can't get SUSE to see either. I'd certainly appreciate any ideas on how to force 10.1 to work with these devices! Thanks in advance, Fred -- Paid purchaser of ALL SuSE Linux releases since 5.x