I've never looked at Solaris very much, so I was curious about some of the major ways it differs from Linux, if anyone can give any insight.

I guess one of the biggest differences is that Linux has a future, and OpenSolaris probably doesn't

Hmm, isn't the question about Solaris, not OpenSolaris ?
In any case, OpenSolaris has now more than one future, being forked between Solaris 11 and illumos/OpenIndiana, not to mention various other distributions like Nexenta and the likes.
It depends how deep you dig. From an end user standpoint, you wouldn't find many differences as the userland is more and more similar (Xorg, Gnome, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, perl, bash, python, openssl, sudo, the gimp, apache, java, MySQL and thousands of other open source programs.) From the administrative side, Solaris is quite different from Linux, although you might find also big differences between various Gnu/Linux distro families.

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I was wondering how long it would take ...
There is no way the differences between Linux distros will prepare you for the differences Solaris will throw at you.

Hi, jlliagre -

Frankly, I didn't know there was ANY good coming from Oracle's acquisition of Sun. Thank you for the positive info!

OpenSolaris mantle assumed by Illumos, OpenIndiana

Solaris is still a very good choice for a commercial use. It has many qualities and features that even (dare I say it) that linux does not. Being a very long time user or bsd and linux I still feel that linux is a clone of the true unix commercial products. I can't say that one is better as such. I doubt one could have performed that clone in today's copyright rules.

One of the older reasons for Solaris was that it was supported on sparc systems. Some technical uses for sparc and distributed computing were features of solaris.

One may wish to look at the new openIndiana to see some of the good work.

Linux is far more suited for the average Joe. It does have uses for even the largest of users. One chooses the software and hardware to match their needs. Don't let any pre-conceived notions stop you from making good choices.

I downloaded Solaris 11 Express.

The live CD ran flawlessly, found all my hardware and got online. Its just too bad that I don't have a spare machine to use for testing. I wonder if the live CD can be used to make a live USB image.

Of course, the differences are huge "behind the curtain". Solaris is probably closer to PC-BSD then to Linux. Its a true UNIX variant. If you like Gnome, you won't notice any differences. I would suggest using partition encryption if the option is available. ZFS can be a very secure filesystem.

You can use virtualization like VirtualBox to run Solaris along your other OS(es).
You can't but there is a simpler way. Just download the LiveUSB image for x86.

In the (not too distant) past I found VBox to be an excellent platform for testing OpenSolaris. Saved it screwing my other systems during install.
Highly recommended.

Unless you choose to overwrite existing partitions and blindingly ignore warnings during installation, OpenSolaris / Solaris 11 Express won't screw any other OS already present on the disk.

Not true - and you know how bad the boot-loader has been through it's history (even as in OpenSolaris). Solaris 10 even made the Windoze boot-loader look friendly.
I haven't (and won't) tried Solaris 11 Express 11 to see if they finally got it right.

Only install in a virtual guest if you value your other systems.

Solaris 10 update 1 (june 2005) and newer, OpenSolaris, and Solaris 11 Express boot loader is Grub 0.97 customized/enhanced to support ZFS boot. Grub stage 2 and the /boot directory are installed on the Solaris partition. No non Solaris partition is modified or even accessed during Solaris installation. Any other operating system installed cannot be affected by installing Solaris, unless of course if you ask the installer to use the whole disk or to use an existing partition. As I already wrote, in the both cases, you are warned about what you are about to do.
If Windows partition(s) are found, they are automatically added to Solaris grub menu.lst entries.
If non Windows partitions are found, they aren't automatically added and this is probably the issue you are complaining of. The solution is quite easy, you simply need either to add a boot entry chainloading these other OSes boot loaders, or just copy and paste the entries from these OSes should they use a compatible grub release, like many Gnu/Linux distributions still do.

One difference is that Solaris is not as buggy as Linux is. Read the interview from the BSD developer:
http://www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/lin..._0616theo.html

Or here you see that Linus Torvalds says that Linux is bloated:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09..._bloated_huge/

There are several Linux kernel developers saying that Linux code is buggy, for instance Andrew Morton
http://lwn.net/Articles/285088/

Dumb question, but can a tarball for Linux be installed on Solaris? Or does it have to be ported? If so, are most packages available for both?

That really depends on the source code. Portable code will compile with no issue, by design, non portable one will require more or less work ...
You'll find most "production/server" oriented packages available for both, but there are undoubtedly more desktop oriented and niche packages for Gnu/Linux. Note than this gap is smaller these days than it use to be several years ago.