I seem to find in certain places that Solaris can take "binaries." If this is true, can it run Windows programs?

I have used Solaris 10 briefly, but I do not recall the OS being able to run Windows applications natively. You can, of course, use wine to run many windows applications for the Solaris platform, similar to the manner that you would in Linux.

Unfortunately that's a problem for Adobe CS3 users. They tell you to install winetricks to bypass some errors that come with CS3 and wine, but no one has told me how to do it yet.

I've not heard of winetricks before. I found the script that supposedly downloads runtime libraries to your system, but have not had any experience to make any suggestions. However, I don't know if this would be feasible for you or not, but one way that I could think of to use Adobe CS3 in a UNIX/Linux environment (or Solaris) would be to utilize a Windows virtual machine, using something such as VirtualBox for this. As I've mentioned, it may not be the most feasible method for you, but it is the only suggestion that I can currently offer to you. Sorry I can not be of more assistance in this area.

No, it's fine. I can't get CS3 until April anyway.

Maybe. :-) I've read that some people have been able to get Wine to run. I'm not among them despite dumping tons of time into it. I can get Wine running on Linux fine, but have not yet had any success on Solaris, even while following very detailed instructions on what's supposed to make it work. There must be some very specific requirements that haven't been completely figured out yet...

It may be because Solaris is coded differently than most distributions. it uses JAVA rather than C as well in most places.

If you use a freshly installed OpenSolaris, there should be no problems compiling Wine. I use the CBE package, as I have posted several times. CBE is a special make file diff, that allows you to take the plain vanilla wine source code, and CBE automatically applies the Solaris make file, diff. And off it goes! But CBE is mainly for OpenSolaris, not S10.

Not sure about what you really mean, but that make sense ...
There is no java in the kernel, and none in the userland that would interfere with Wine.

You can have a look at OpenSolaris code here:

http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/

There is no java in the kernel. That would be a very bad desicion as it would need a JVM and the OS would get slow. No decent comersial OS has Java in it's kernel.

I guess that's true. Maybe that's why Macromedia Products went so slow, they were JAVA based, or J Based.

What? Macromedia uses Java? That sounds very, very dubious.

There is something elseI find intriguing about Solaris, though. Why is it that Solaris is so much faster launching java applications than any other OS I know? With a dual core and 4GB RAM, Linux takes at least 15 seconds to launch NetBeans 6. On Solaris, it's whoosh, maybe three seconds. What is the secret?

It may have a Java Compiler built in to accept JAVA Binaries. After all, Sun Microsystems made the OS.