Xterm and others
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Cancan should be usable on most terminals, but there are some issues to consider. Most importantly, you might want to tailor the terminal settings as well, to suit the closely interactive and immediate style of multi-user networking :-)
Under X environment, the best way to adjust terminal settings is to have it done automatically at X startup (from .xinitrc perhaps), but you can edit and run "xrdb ~/.Xdefaults" to try out various options. (You'll have to start a new xterm after that.) Among other things, the resources worth tweaking are:
XTermsunKeyboard: true
XTermbackground: gray
XTermsaveLines: 5000
XTermscrollTtyOutput: false
XTermscrollKey: true
rxvtkeysym.0xFFBE: "\033OP"
rxvtkeysym.0xFFBF: "\033OQ"
rxvtkeysym.0xFFC0: "\033OR"
rxvt*keysym.0xFFC1: "\033OS"
In the example above, separate keypad keys are enabled (to use arrow keys for history and keypad for walking), the screaming bright white background tamed, lots of scrollback history requested (and set so that it is usable even while more output is being printed). The rxvt entries make F1 to F4 output the same string as xterm does.
Original xterm is probably not that great of a choice, anyway. The best terminal emulation would have to be glitch-free, lightning fast but not jerky.
Ansi colours
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You may ignore this section if you do not care about text colour or if your terminal has no "ansi colour" capacity.
To begin with, some terminal emulators display those colours, but do not reset them properly when "\E[m" sequence is sent. For example, older versions of rxvt may have this behaviour.
Cancan ought to work fine with these terminals, provided a certain termcap capability ("op") is defined to compensate. There's also the -DWITH_STDATTR compile-time option that adds an additional command "stdattr". This allows you to select default attributes for normal non-coloured text. Give "stdattr none" to disable the work-around.
While most terminals can properly handle attribute reset sequence, they may have other glitches. Xterm had several undesirable features but I'm not sure if these are worked out by now. The implementation of jump scroll mode was buggy with respect to background colour. Insert and delete operations also glitched if a line had characters with different background colour. Again, if a correct termcap entry is found (that reflects this flaw), no problems should arise.