Following the default installation of wireshark it is only possible to capture packets as root, which is clearly less than ideal. It is much better to run wireshark as a non-root user:
sudo apt-get install wireshark sudo dpkg-reconfigure wireshark-common
Answer yes – this will create a new group called wireshark. Then add all users you want to allow access the wireshark packet capture interface to this new group:
sudo adduserwireshark sudo adduser wireshark
You will have to log out and then log in again, so that changes made to group memberships are recognised.