Few Questions About Debian

[Depo Catcher <depocatcher@gmail.com>]

I've played around with this a bit and considering switching over my 
workstation to Debian.
Currently I use FreeBSD - but the Virtual Machine software I use 
(VMWare) it's supported as well as on Linux.

Few questions I have:

During install there is an option to install to encrypted disk which is 
pretty sweet sounding.
How does that work, I'm assuming everything but /boot is encrypted? Does 
it use GELI or something else?
What is the default encryption used and is there any way to change it? 
Does Linux support crypto cards that work with this?

I take it apt-get is the way to maintain packages on Debian? 
Say I want to apply all the security patches [or to get all updates] for 
my version, is there an easy way to do that?

If a person wanted, could they recompile all packages from source (and 
use optimized complier options) instead of installing from binaries?

When I start it up (just did base install for some testing) I get a 
bunch of "Starting XXX ... Warning: Fake start-stop =daemon called, 
doing nothing."
Where XXX is and rc/init job.  What's that about?

Thanks