There are currently three user-level tools in Red Hat Linux 6.1 that configure aspects of the system time: linuxconf, timeconfig, and timetool. 1. Linuxconf can change whether the system uses GMT in the hardware clock and can change the time/date. (As of 1.16r10.) It apparently cannot change the time zone. (There's a drop-down for selecting a time zone, but selecting a new time zone from this drop-down doesn't appear to have any effect. The drop-down also doesn't show the time zone selected during installation or via timeconfig.) 2. timeconfig _can_ change the time zone, and times used by linuxconf will obey it. timeconfig can also change the GMT-in-hardware setting linuxconf offers access to. 3. timetool, which is still included though it's supposed to be obsoleted by Linuxconf, cannot deal with GMT-in-hardware. It will query the _system_ time, but store changes in both the system clock _and_ the hardware clock. Thus timetool breaks GMT-in-hardware. The simplest fix is to update Linuxconf to be able to do everything, and then kill off timetool. Yet, timetool still has one advantage: it's a nicer-looking tool than Linuxconf, and it's easier to see. We have an application where the only screen on a system might be a TV (via a VGA-to-NTSC converter), where resolution is really bad -- timetool works in this environment, linuxconf doesn't. Ideally, timetool should obey GMT-in-hardware. If that's not where Red Hat wants to go, it should drop the tool, at least from the GNOME menus.
Please check if the latest linuxconf-1.17r2-2 from Raw Hide fixes the problem with Linuxconf. The bug in timetool should be fixed in 2.7.3, which will be in the next Raw Hide.