how do I checkout svn with http authentication on mac

When I do a :

svn co http://<url>/<repo> <local_dir>

on my macbook (10.6.6) I get the following message:

svn: OPTIONS of 'http://<url>/<repo>': 200 OK (http://<url>)

without any prompt for password or anything useful happening.

is the dev/repo machine on the network. Usually I can do the same checkout from the dev machine but another developer is able to check it out from a different linux box and the windows developers can checkout locally using tortoise-svn without problems.

Is there something special I need to do to solve this for mac?
Extra: really I am using git-svn but then I realized that even regular svn isn't working so I thought I would start there. Is there anything I different I need to do to use git-svn with http authentication