According to bug report #445737 openSUSE 11.1 has been tested for and supports
an encrypted root file system through LUKS. However, the process to configure
this is manual, tedious, time consuming and error prone.

By allowing the user to encrypt the root and swap file systems (the /home file
system can already be encrypted) through YaST during the installation, these
manual steps could be averted and the overall user experience improved.

If there is a concern about user confusion with the modified boot process
(typing in a password at startup), there could be a warning given to the user
if the they select to encrypt the root file system, after which it would be
allowed.

By supporting these changes, a user on a laptop could be reasonably assured
that his data could not be stolen if the laptop was lost. For justification,
see
http://en.opensuse.org/Encrypted_Root_File_System_with_SUSE_HOWTO#Why_encrypt_the_root_file_system.3F

Some of the changes which would be required to implement this would be changes
to YaST, allowing encryption of the root and swap file systems and changes to
how it creates the GRUB menu.lst file when it installs the boot loader.

According to Arvin Schnell, internal fate #304470 states this is a feature under consideration for SLES/SLED, but not openSUSE.

Help us Obi-Wan Kenobi (er... Andreas Jaeger), you're our only hope...

See also Bug 446122: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=446122