Well, I got Avidemux and Cinerella to work, and they both do what I need.  Avidemux is much easier to use, but I am not sure why my lame encoder does not work properly with it.  Anyways, now I can happily edit movies in Linux.  Cinerella looks really heavy duty, but it was easy to install.  To install Avidemux, build it from the tar ball, the RPMS I found don’t work well.