Hi,
When I installed Ubuntu on one of my computers a couple of months ago, I had selected the encrypt /home option. That's caused me a fair amount of grief with the computer refusing to resume from suspend, and I was a bit annoyed that it didn't mention in the installer it would also encrypt the swap and the associated problems with hibernate& suspend. Nor did it ask me whether I wanted the swap to be encrypted.
But the real question I'm wondering, is actually how secure is this method? My concern isn't with the encryption itself, it's the problem that the mount passphrase is decrypted using the users system password (one of the reasons for this is to prevent the home directory becoming unusable if the user changes the password, from what I understand). But the issue comes from the fact that the system files in / are left unencrypted. This has the obvious advantage of speed, but if the authentication passwords are stored in plain text on the unencrypted system folders, (especially the root password since the user is a sudoer) than the password used to decrypt the mount passphrase of the directory would be stored unencrypted. Is this correct? Am I missing something here?!