The device eth1 is most likely your wireless card.

The linux equivalent of ipconfig is ifconfig. It will show you your IP address etc.

The linux equivalent of 'ipconfig /renew eth1' is 'pump -i eth1'. This will ask your DHCP server for an IP address. You can run this manually just to see if you can get things working.

There is a file called /etc/network/interfaces. This contains a list of your network cards and commands to set them up.

It should contain an entry like 'iface eth1 inet dhcp'. There are probably a myriad of different menu options and programs to set up your networks, but they all just aim to do the same thing, which is modify this file. The command 'man interfaces' can tell you more.

If you have a wireless access point, I don't believe that it is necessary to specify any ESSID's or anything. I think the access point handles all that for you (I could be wrong though).