So, Wireshark in Mavericks doesn’t work terribly well. If you install XQuartz and the Wireshark application then try to run it, it’ll just sit silently mocking you in the Dock.
There’s a few steps. First you want to add it to the Applications menu on XQuartz. Run XQuartz and then right click on the icon, select Applications, then Customize
Add a new item, and fill it out as below. This will allow you to run it from the XQuartz menu in future.
Just for testing purposes, I’ll show you what’s going wrong in xterm:
For some reason, XQuartz can’t display what it wants to, poor guy. The command to run is export DISPLAY=:0 and it’ll open any of the Wireshark windows you’re already running. To avoid this issue in future, what I’ve done is made a little script that automagically does that when you run Wireshark.
If you move the Wireshark binary /Applications/Wireshark.app/Contents/MacOS/Wireshark to Wireshark-bin, then create the following script in its place it’ll automagically run the export command on startup:
export DISPLAY=:0
/Applications/Wireshark.app/Contents/MacOS/Wireshark-bin
Make sure you go to the directory and run chmod +x Wireshark to allow it to be executable, and you’ll be fine to go.
If you’ve got Wireshark installed in another directory, ensure you update the paths appropriately.
I’m sure there’s a better way to do this, but … it worked for me 🙂