[CentOS] centos & mysql

Hi everyone, as a newbie to linux Im having a but of a problem getting up and running. Hopefully one of you you can point me in the right direction. I have installed Centos4 on an old server here at work as a dev box, installation went well, and I have mysql up and running. However when I try and connect from my laptop using mysql administrator I get an error saying "the host is not allowed to connect to this server" I tried disabling the firewall to see if that helped and it made no difference. I also tried pinging the server and that was fine.

I tried connecting using the servers ip, name localhost and password as blank.

When im logged in a root on the server this allows be to login ok.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

Steve