I played with razor-qt for a few days on my netbook, but found too many features missing for my daily use, so I installed the LXDE release. During installation, for both releases, I chose "America > Eastern" for the time zone.
On both cases, after rebooting the time came up GMT.
Interestingly, when I ran
dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
the utility came up already pointing to "America > New York" -- I did not need to change anything. I only needed to highlight the "OK" boxes, and apply, and the displayed time was corrected. So I think maybe the /etc/localtime link is not made correctly, or something like that.
