Pool and solo are pretty much the same. Instead of pointing to your local system you are pointing to a remote system that's it. Once you solve a block you get 50 BTC when locally instead of fractions of BTC from pools that is pretty much the only difference.
Thanks. That confirms my understanding of the concept. I guess what surprised me was that pool mining with poclbm looks like this:
17/06/2011 23:05:37, fd94be7d, accepted
17/06/2011 23:05:46, long poll: new block 00000c5220f6a603
17/06/2011 23:06:06, ac91fa5f, accepted
17/06/2011 23:06:11, c3050ae0, accepted
17/06/2011 23:06:26, a4408403, accepted
17/06/2011 23:06:31, 60eff26b, accepted
17/06/2011 23:06:39, d59cfbbd, accepted
17/06/2011 23:06:45, 8e660ab0, accepted
293182 khash/s
While solo mining just looks like this:
284757 khash/s
The lack of a flowing status is kind of puzzling once you've become accustomed to it.