First you should find out what type of USB device your data acquisition card is. If it is a serial device, you need a kernel module for it: usb-serial. No such module seems to be provided with 770/N800, as far as I can tell.

If your USB device provides custom endpoints instead, you need to write a driver for it yourself. Typically libusb is used for that. Looks like libusb is available for N800 at least, I have no 770 to check at the moment.

I don't know about Perl, but atleast in Python 2.5 it is possible to write wrappers for C libraries (the "dl" module), so that libusb can be used without writing an extension module in C.