Yeah, I set up disk encryption for all my partitions except for /boot which If I remember from the install (6.06 LTS) wasn't a standard option at the time, upgrading to 8.04 caused me a whole load of grief.

I know I should rebuild it and it'll probably be fine, but if I was going to rebuild I think I'd use Arch instead (just a personal choice).

But the VMs of Ubuntu that I use of newer versions, yeah they're great.