avrdude errors....

Hi all

I have a STK500 which I use to program an atmega8. It works reasonably 
well with avrstudio running in Win98 in a vmware virtual machine. Since 
this is a roundabout way to try and run everything under linux I'm 
trying to avoid all this by running avrdude under linux 7.2.

Now I've downloaded avrdude 4.1.0 and have compiled and installed it OK 
without any problems. When I run it, with the following options,  I get 
the following errors :

bin]$ ./avrdude -p m8 -c stk500 -t

avrdude: stk500_program_enable(): failed to enter programming mode
avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1

avrdude done.  Thank you.

Can anyone tell me what this means and what I'm doing wrong.
Any help appreciated

Sammy