> I fought like hell to install all the deps before throwing in the towel.

What? The deps are pretty tame for such a large program.

tcl8.6, tk8.6, tcllib, libsqlite3-tcl, libtk-img

So, for a debian/ubuntu machine:

    sudo apt-get install tcl8.6 tk8.6 tcllib libsqlite3-tcl libtk-img

RHEL/Fedora and friends will be similar, except with yum/dnf.

All of this info is at the top of the downloads section:

http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/editor.html#downloads