Have you tried to run the command with sudo?

If you have verified with lsusb -v that you can see the USB device connected to the machine then you should be able to get it going on linux with no issues, I had a machine set up running multiple brands of USB ASICs to both bgminer & cgminer running with different configs so that part should work ok.  The thing that I had to do was use sudo to allow the miner software permission to access the USB devices.  One I did that it worked like a dream.

Good luck..