Oh, that's a new one indeed. You'd think that inetd could only run under root since it wants to open ports < 1024. Then again: it doesn't succeed in doing that, hence the error message. So it can start under a regular user, but it doesn't work as advertised then. You should see some protest from inetd in dmesg -a though, unless you started it when the machine was already running (still, I'd expect some feedback even then).