Hi Yeah all these things can be done with solaris, and solaris isnt hard it just UNIX...lol
My suggestion to you is to use Solaris x86 9 With the Gnome desktop... Though there is a new GUI availble direct from sun... Looks a bit like windows 98 ?? Anyway you can use most opensource software on Solaris..
Network, networks to just about anything .... you could use samba for file sharing, but I must admit unless you already have a licensed copy...go Linux it cheaper... Solaris real excels on sparc hardware...not x86
Any questios e-mail me