yeah hi thx for your reply,

but I was already ploughing my way through the manual, I thought the idea of these forums was to help!

anyway I soon realised that the "->" was, if the command line didnt recognise what i was trying to put in, and was waiting for more really

back to the database after i had created the database I didnt realise I had to create accounts for it as well ,that took some finding,I think it wasnt clear because knoppix has already got mysql installed I was skipping some of the manual.

all working fine now,

feel free to post if you have the same difficulties, I do monitor my posts