I'm attempting to install OpenSolaris 2008.11 on my laptop, but for some reason the disc drive hates the CD and craps out on it. Therefore, is it possible to install OpenSolaris from an image on a hard disk or over a network?

You can install over a network but you need a separate image server and you'd need to burn a CD of Partimage. To do this you'd need to have a fresh, clean installations of Solaris so I guess this won't work for you. Do you have a version of Linux already installed and if so, can you run Solaris in a virtual machine like I do with Virtualbox?

Well the computer in question doesn't have enough resources to do that (only 512MB RAM total). Could I use a different computer to run Solaris in a VM and then transfer the image of that to the laptop?

You can but I haven't done this yet and all I can advise. I believe what you can do is use a virtualbox command called clonevdi or something like that. I'm not quite certain how you get a copy of the image of the VM. Once you do that, you'll need to (obviously) transfer the image to the destination machine and I suggest this: Use the Partimage LiveCD to boot the destination machine. Connect the machine hosting the image to the destination machine with an Ethernet cable. Make sure both machines have static ip addresses. When you boot into Partimage on the destination machine, tell it the ip address of the machine that has the image and indicate you are restoring an image to the destination drive.

For a full list of HowTo's, the site partimage.org has plenty of walk-through's. I would imagine you could also load the image on a USB drive and this way run Partimage from the LiveCD and tell it to pull the image from the USB drive - thus no need for connecting the machines. I hope this gets you in the right direction.