Altho i do condone exploring hardware travesty....
In my humble opinion, all you need is one operating system with virtualization solutions (vbox, vmware,kvm) for other operating systems.
So the Solaris display driver is capable of driving an external VGA display but not the laptop's own display. Have you checked whether there are any display settings in the BIOS that can be tweaked?...
Have you tried with the Solaris Live CD, you can down load it here. (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/install-2245079.html)
On the Oracle HCL, there are only two certified Lenovo Laptops. One is the X240 and the other is the T440p, that being said the X230 shouldn't be a million miles away.