Yes. Send an e-mail to listserv@main.naf.cz, saying either "subscribe arachne" or "unsubscribe arachne". Once subscribed, you can post messages to arachne@main.naf.cz - address of the mailing list.
Yes. xChaos software licensed full source code of Arachne to Caldera UK. People from Caldera added animated GIFs and Novell dialer, completely changed the design of the browser, implemented their own support for frames, and succeeded in compiling all this stuff as 32 bit application, while Arachne is 16 bit application.
Caldera doesn't have exclusive access to Arachne in any way, so you can choose from two DOS browsers. xChaos software welcomes Caldera's DOS and Linux activities.
NAF - Network and Fiction is network company running the web server www.naf.cz. xChaos software was not able to handle growing demand for support and information, so NAF became also main distributor of Arachne.
We are planning to port Arachne to Linux (first SVGALIB, later maybe also X11 or new graphical standard called GGI), which will unfortunately require rewriting it a lot. Once the port is completed, Arachne will be the first multi-platform fullscreen web browser. As web design is becoming more and more fullscreen-oriented (see all those pages designed for resolution 800x600 or more), this is interesting challange for windowing enviroments generally: will future Internet surfers prefere fullscreen, or windows based design ?
Once Arachne is rewritten to be more portable, it shouldn't be problem to compile it also on any other platform, if it is compatible with DOS or Unix.
We are planning to add Hercules and CGA support later, because it is essential for compatibility with hand-held devices and Personal Digital Assistants, which usually use monochrome graphics.
However, our ability to support nonstandard hardware is limited. We suggest you to buy some second-hand SVGA card with 512 or more kB of memory anyway.
There's a long list of methods how to speed it up. Because this list is quite long and confusing, let's summarize it: You need at least 33 Mhz processor to anything useful with Arachne. This usually means 386 or 486 compatible CPU. You have to use some kind of disk cache (SMARTDRV, NWCACHE) or run Arachne from some kind of virtual disk - "ramdisk". This totaly disqualifies PCs with less than 2 MB of memory - on such hardware, you can use Arachne to occassionaly view short HTML pages with few images, but don't expect anything more. If you have only 2 MB, dedicate 512 KB for EMS or XMS, 512 KB for disk cache, and pray.
Arachne eMail reader is not really usable without at least 4 MB of memory, used for heavy disk caching (1 MB DOS/1 MB XMS/2 MB disk cache). However, you can try to use text mode Pegasus mail for DOS to read and compress messages downloaded by Arachne.
Our dialer setup screen is not able to deal with some extremely non-standard modem configurations - and unfortunately, also with many standard configurations (for example, with modem on COM4, you may have to pretend it is on COM2 and manuly select correct base address and irq which belongs to your COM4; you can also try to manualy enter your parameters to ARACHNE.CFG)
xChaos software is not responsible for any included or recommended PPP dialer: we only wrote user friendly HTML setup screens for the most popular PPP dialers for DOS. At least DOSPPPD seems to work on many typical DOS based PCs.