The Inspiron has an ATI 3D pro video card which is fairly standard. Sun supports ATI cards in their Ultra5's, so they have some really good drivers. The inspiron has a 8meg disk, so I used partition magic to split it up 2.1 for unix, and the rest for windows. I haven't re-installed Solaris back on it yet after that, and in fact I reverted it back to a full Windows machine until I get the latest rev. The reason I haven't re-installed Solaris is that I ordered Solaris 2.7, i.e. Solaris 7, so I was waiting for that to come in.
X works the same way it does on the sparc.
For booting, you can use System Commander. Incidentally, I have a small scan line problem with the LCD at 640x480 in Windows, but not under Solaris. For unix, I wanted something that supports really fast Java. Linux is fragmented and usually takes a couple of weeks to catch up to the latest patches and releases. Solaris always supports it right off.