How to join partitions into one

Hmmm, tricky. It's often a good plan to have one partition for the root of ubuntu "/" and a 2nd partition for "/home" for increased stability, is it possible to consider using your existing partitions in that way?

As Tom said, it is better to use separate root and home partitions (and a separate swap-partition). Also, you cannot alter mounted partitions, so you might have to use a live-CD.

As for the merging; I have heard that Partition Magic can do that, but that is a commercial programme, and I have no (recent) experience with it. As an alternative, you could use Gparted: backup the data from one of the partitions-to-be-merged, expand the other partition into the unallocated space, and move the backed-up data to the expanded partition.

Note that you should always backup important data before messing around with partitions: there is always, and with any programme, a slight chance that you lose data.

Yes really all i can think of for doing this is to simply copy whatever is on 'the other partition' onto the root partition (or whatever) of Ubuntu and then delete the old one and resize the new one.

That makes it sound fairly easy but there are likely to be several pitfalls along the way - well worth avoiding. Partition Magic can only really cope with Windows type partitions i think and also it's proprietary which means that you don't really have a chance of knowing what its doing and if(when) it goes wrong you have to pay for support that is unlikely to be able to help much anyway. In linux the normal partition manager, GPartEd in gnome (actually not just Ubuntu but also Xubuntu) or QtPartEd in Kubuntu which is probably best run from the LiveCd is much better anyway (imo) also the team that made GPartEd have also put together a specialist distro (an alternative to Ubuntu but very specialised) called GpartedLiveCd and of course there are also distros like PartedMagic and SystemRescueCd although these two are largely aimed at fixing Windows problems i think
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=systemrescue
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=partedmagic
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=gparted
Note that gparted the program is in many distros but there's also an entire distro with the same name :( For some reason the Gparted in Ubuntu is not as flexible as it is in most other distros. I usually put a wolvix c in the cd drive and boot up from that
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootFromCD
as is so often the way the default choice is to boot straight into a working desktop without making changes to the machine and if it works we call this a LiveCd session.

I hope something here helps!
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Thanks Tom, that solved my question.

Thank you Tom and Floris - that did it! I love this Linux (Ubuntu) world.

Laurik

Welcome to linux-land, especially the Ubuntu corner of it :))
Glad you're enjoying it too :) Hope you have as much fun with it as i have so far. Nicely fixed btw :)
Congrats and regards from
Tom :)