Hi, I'm 55 and just installed MEPIS myself. Anyway, I installed Wine myself today, so how hard could it be?
When they say 'open a terminal,' the 'terminal' is equivalent to the thing called 'Konsole.' Do you see the 'K Start bar' at the bottom of your Desktop? See the third icon to the right, the blue gear on top of the gray gear? That's the System Settings group. The bottom option should be Konsole. The terminal (Konsole) is where you type the infamous command line. (But an old DOS user like you isn't afraid of that, right?)
Couple things to be aware of: You need to be in the right place, the right subdir, before you use that Konsole, or you can use cd commands (just like in DOS) within the terminal to move to where you need to be. You won't be able to ./configure wine until you're in the wine subdir, strangely enough.
The 'cd' followed by .. moves you up in the directory structure. Then use ls (list) to see what's in the new level. Move down into the ones you see by typing cd name-of-dir -- but if you want to move further down, just remember that Linux (based on Unix, like the Web directories) uses the ordinary (forward) slash, not the Win backslash.
MEPIS is KDE (that's its GUI), rather than GNOME, though I don't think that's a big deal. Don't panic. Take frequent breaks, it lets your mind integrate what you're going through and put things together better. Gives you a bit of distance from the frustration, too. Keep posting, we'll keep helping.
(Not me so much, but the more experienced users.)
P.S. Firefox comes with the new MEPIS, on the live boot CD. (I was already using it under W OS.) The Ctrl-+ keys increase font size, but you can also change font type (as well as size) under preferences, last option in the Edit menu (I think).
