useradd

I recently installed Gentoo 1.2 from the stage3 tarball. I updated the
portage tree and merged a recent linux kernel (linux-2.4.19). I added a
user using the command:

useradd -m -g users -G wheel username

and set a password. Now, when I log into this account I get an error:

/usr/bin/whoami: cannot find username for UID 1000

The prompt looks like "I have no name!@stoner / $" where stoner is my
hostname.

I suppose it should look like "username@stoner / $". What went wrong?

Thanks in advance for any help!

david