can ado.net connect to Oracle on a unix machine?

In VS2003 (which is what I am using) there are tools for Oracel data adapter,
connection... If an Oracle ODBC driver is loaded on a Windows machine (2000,
XP) , is it possible to connect to that Oracle DB with ado.net? Would this
even require the Oracle ODBC driver to be installed (given that
security/permissions are set, and the connection string is given) in order to
connect to this db?

Thanks,
Rich
.