What kinds of hosts can I connect to?

We have a short answer for this one, too: just about any system with an ARCnet driver.

Not surprisingly, we also have some caveats.

First of all, if you want to use TCP/IP, the remote host has to use TCP/IP. Surprise, surprise. Not only that, but the remote host needs to support the same packet encapsulation type as Linux; luckily, we can support all the encapsulation types I know about, including RFC1201, RFC1051, and Microsoft's ethernet-style encapsulation.

If you use RFC1201, the Linux ARCnet driver supports IPX compatible with the Novell "trxnet" driver too. It turns out that RFC1201 is exactly like Novell's packet format. Coincidence?

Nowadays, ARCnet is used less on general-purpose networks and more on industrial networks with embedded systems and various different types of killer robots. Some people want to run Linux-ARCnet on these networks as well, and usually you don't need TCP/IP for that. So, the newest driver provides a special raw mode encapsulation driver that just sends and receives things directly, without trying to comply with any particular protocol standards.

And naturally, in typical Linux style, we let you route packets between all of these different formats, protocols, and encapsulations. You can even route IPX between ethernet and ARCnet networks, or connect ARCnet hosts using RFC1201 and RFC1051 by using a Linux gateway.