External USB CD-RW for HP 2133 Mini-Note

I just purchased the HP 2133 and attempted to use an old USB CD-RW HP CD Writer 8230E. It has been in use on a Windows XP machine in my office.

In an XTerm session, we issued a dmesg command, which did show the device, however, we were not able to locate a specific device, nor did it show up in File Browser.

Is this a device that is just not going to work under SUSE or the HP box itself?

The mini-note came preloaded with Suse kernel 2.6.16.60-0.27. After the initial boot, I’ve downloaded and installed around 80 updates.

Incidentally, I am a relative newbie to using Linux, and Suse in particular.