Online note of a manifest I regularly use to set date, time and timezone information on ubuntu hosts. Works on vagrant box precise64 (http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.box) and AWS EC2 Ubuntu instances.

datetime.pp

# Make sure you apt-get update before applying this.

package { "language-pack-en":
  ensure => latest
}

package { "tzdata": 
  ensure => latest
} 

file { "/etc/localtime":
  ensure => "/usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Melbourne",
  require => Package["tzdata"]
}

file { "/etc/timezone":
  content => "Australia/Melbourne\n",
  require => Package["tzdata"]
}

exec { "/usr/sbin/dpkg-reconfigure --frontend noninteractive tzdata":
  require => File["/etc/timezone"],
  refreshonly => true,
  subscribe => [ Package["tzdata"], File["/etc/timezone"] ]
}

exec { "/usr/sbin/locale-gen en_AU.UTF-8":
  refreshonly => true,
  require => Package["language-pack-en"]
}