I recently installed Mandrake Linux 9.0 on a Windows machine, and now I'm trying to partition my drive so that I can give Linux most of the space.

My drive right now looks like this...
http://ubcomics.com/domus/non_zero/img/mis...c/diskdrake.png

The first blank spot is where I lessened the size of the Windows parition. The second is where I deleted the "home" partition because it seemed totally useless.

Is there any way I can join those two blank spaces into the main Linux partition?

/home is where the user (you did create a user and do not use root for everyday operations) saves personal data files etc. You could recreate the /home directory in your root partition.

According to parted you can not resize a linux partition (ext2, ext3 or reiserfs) by moving its start point. You could move your swap file from back to the empty space in front and then resize to use the free space at the end of the drive. What front space is left in you could create an additional linux partition to use. You will need to boot the rescue mode on the install CD to run parted. Not a good idea to resize mounted partitions. See www.gnu.org for more info.