I have two problems with kismet:
1) It won't compile with Imagemagick support. I have Imagemagick 6.2.7-0 installed from slackware-current.

2) I tried kismet (without imagick support) and it won't allow to run as root, that's okay. When I run as 'user' I get:
I think the error is from ifconfig because searching the net, it seems that only ifconfig gives that error but I might (and probably am) wrong.
So I can't run kismet as root because it just plain won't and I can't run kismet as user because I don't have root privilege. It goes in circle.

I'm using the latest kismet (2006-04-R1) from their website and I also tried the latest found on linuxpackages.net (2005.08.R1) to get the same results.

This might be a silly question, but did you edit the config file?

From source, it _should_ be in /usr/local/etc/; for the one from linuxpackages, it might be in /etc.

Near the top, you will find a line that states the user that kismet should drop to after it has been started as root.

When you run as root, what is the error it quits with?

Thanks quip! none of what you said helped BUT you put me on to something else entirely! and now it works. In fact it was mostly your last sentence that made me think about something, but don't ask me what it was this morning before I got to work now I don't remember ;P