Commercial versions will usually have support agreements and help hotlines to assist you / your company in any issues you might encounter. A gratis distro is usually limited to whatever help is available on the distro's forums.
Shareware software is commercial software. Shareware simply refers to the ability to redistribute a limited trial version of the product to others.
It would have to be a particular firmware version and hasn't been updated afterwards, and the Linux distro must explicitly support the PS3.
The newest one. As of February 2009, that would be Sabayon 4.0.
My advise would be to start with a flavor of Linux that closely resembles the Windows environment you're probably familiar with. I recommend Kubuntu Linux 4.01. It is widely available for download for free and you can choose it to run alongside Windows.
The primary software that they use is in no way compatible with Linux. They do not want to spend any money on retraining/ rehiring IT. They have a deal going with manufacturers and Microsoft. There are many other reasons why a company would opt not to use linux as well as many why they would.
Neither - Linux is an operating system (software). It is used from home base systems to commercial applications and companies. The question is similar to asking the same thing about Microsoft Windows - you would have the same answer.
The Eee PC should have come with a CD to reinstall Linux. If you do not have this disc, then the only way you could install the version of Linux that was on the Eee (Xandros) would be if you had an image of the hard drive before you formatted it. Note that there are other Linux distros customized for the Eee PC that are available free of charge if you want to try another Linux distro.
There is no native version available for Linux. The Windows version can be played on most Linux distributions with the use of Wine, an application compatibility layer. Depending on what graphics card you have, you may experience graphical glitches in the game. You will also need to install a NoCD patch (which you would probably want to anyway) to preven the game from checking for the disc every time you want to play it.
Most businesses will not have employees familiar with the use of Linux distributions. In this case, a more windows-like version would be recommended, such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin OS or PCLinuxOS. If you are planning to keep your company computers small and cheap then a lightweight distribution would be best. Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Puppy Linux, Bodhi and Damn Small Linux are all easy to run on older hardware.
No. As a general rule, there are no "portable apps" for Linux. Firstly because it is a potential security risk to allow untrusted binaries to be run on a system, thus a competent system administrator will not allow a public Linux computer to run binaries outside a trusted /bin or /usr/bin directory. Secondly, there are simply not that many public Linux computers, so the relative utility of a portable version would be gone anyway.
Yellow Dog Linux is the only operating system officially endorsed by Sony. However, the necessary support for the PS3 hardware has already been integrated into the Linux kernel, so almost any PowerPC version of Linux can be used. The other popular choices are Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora.
There is no one "current Linux operating system" due to the fact that Linux is developed and distributed in various forms by many different individuals and corporations. The current version of Linux depends on which of these "distributions" you are interested in installing. For example, a popular distribution of Linux tailored for use as a Desktop system is Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com), which is distributed by the company Canonical. The current release of Ubuntu is 8.04, which was released in April this year. There are literally hundreds of distributions freely available online, but other distributions which are of note in the desktop arena include Fedora (www.fedoraproject.org), openSUSE (www.opensuse.org) and Debian (www.debian.org), each of which have their own advantages and disadvantages. Each distribution has its own release schedule, but you can find out what the current version is (and download it) from the official websites.