I would suggest to use virtualbox:
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBoxBasically it allows you to run solaris (or windows, or linux) on top of your existing OS (ubuntu in this case). The installation
of virtualbox takes ~ 10 min in ubuntu, and then you have to install the OS in the virtual machine. Performances are great,
especially for computation intensive stuff like hardware synthesis (instruction are executed natively by the machine, there is no emulation).
This as many advantages: you cannot screw up your partition, you can switch between your host os and the virtual machine seamlessly and the virtual machine take only what it needs (in term of disk space).
Hope this helps.
To answer your original questions, search in a solaris related forum. And it's not stupid to install a Unix a laptop: MacOSX and Linux are both "unix" OS.
Chelmi.