TZ in Xfld, and the Standardization Gripe.

So far I like Xfld, but I’m not happy with the Knoppix stuff in Xfld, though.
Getting the time on my machine to work right was a pain. Thinking it was like Debian, I changed the /etc/timezone and /etc/localtime, and that didn’t work. Then I noticed knoppix scripts/configuration. It took me quite sometime to discover what was wrong, it tried changing different file then rebooting the machine until it worked. (There must be an easier way then to reboot, but at the time I didn’t feel like figuring that out.)
Their seemed to be an incomplete or buggy knoppix script that always set the timezone to EDT America/NewYork (/etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig/.)
I changed it so that the script would always set the TZ/timezone to Asia/Riyadh.
Why is that something as basic as the timezone on the machine has to be done in different ways on different Debian-based distros? I realize that Debian doesn’t do everything that distos want done, but something as basic as setting the timezone should be standard.
I read that Ubuntu are getting ready to release an XFCE/Debian based distro. I think I’ll try it. Ubuntu seems to be very popular, I’m not sure why, though. I tried it the Live CD, and it didn’t really grab me like other Live CDs, such as Mepis or PCLinuxOS did. Maybe I should read more about it.