[Ethereal-users] running ethereal as non-root on debian/kde

[richard white <recw@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

I've run into a problem that I don't have the experience to find an elegant 
and secure way around, and that did not seem to be covered in the wikis.

Ethereal info:-
Version 0.10.13 (C) 1998-2005 Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Compiled with GTK+ 2.8.10, with GLib 2.8.6, with libpcap 0.9.4, with libz 
1.2.3,
with libpcre 6.4, without UCD-SNMP or Net-SNMP, with ADNS.

Running with libpcap version 0.9.4 on Linux 2.4.27-2-386.

ethereal was nstalled from debian testing, and runs fine, except that I have 
to jump through hoops to do captures.  It's a privilige, rather than a system 
problem  (tcpdump works fine).  

This is a production machine, running kde as a normal user and I'd like to run 
ethereal from that environment.  Ethereal runs fine, if started from an 
xterm, but can't of course do captures because the xserver is not running 
with root privs.  I CAN do captures if I run ethereal under a second xserver 
started as root. but I don't like the security implications of that (and it's 
a nuisance).  The wiki refs to privilege issues with /dev/bpf* don't seem to 
apply to linux.

I'm stuck, and  suspect I'm missing something obvious... can anyone help, 
please?

Thanks!

Richard