I just grabbed a copy of libc from the empeg and ran it through strings and grep..

/home/empeg/arm-empeg-linux-new/etc/localtime

Badly set up cross compilation environment, or a messed up glibc configure script. Because this path doesn't exist, none of the userspace binaries in the developer image can find timezone information. Either rebuilding libc6 with the correct paths or creating a symlink should fix it.

mkdir -p /home/empeg
ln -s / /home/empeg/arm-empeg-linux-new