Starting mysql daemon

[Themistoklis Bourdenas]

Hi, I 'm trying to setup a mysql server in my machine for some testing but I 'm having some trouble. First of all my platform is SuSE Linux 9.0 and MySQL version 4.0.15.
The problem is that I try to run the daemon:
mysqld --user=root
I know I shouldn't run mysqld as root, but my machine isn't exposed to internet so there is no big reason why not, nevertheless I just want to do some testing. Anyway the problem is that I get the following message:
040823 13:36:39 Fatal error: Can't open privilege tables: Table 'mysql.host' doesn't exist
and I can't find any reference for it in the manual. Does anybody have any clue about that?

Thanks in advance,
Themis