Spent most of the night installing and configuring both my home desktop and laptop. The installations are closer to my desired state.
My desktop now runs both CentOS 5 and OpenSolaris. Both of them run fine and the boot process defaults to OpenSolaris.
My laptop now multi-boots successfully to Vista and CentOS 5.0. I spent some time to configure the graphics card. However, there is no success yet with the XServer issue on OpenSolaris. So even though there is an installation of OpenSolaris, it is mute for now.
I am going to teach device driver concepts to post graduate students sometime next week and the CentOS installation on the laptop is going to be handy.