PHP date() error - system timezone settings

[Peter Hebert]

On certain systems, when browsing the site root in browser, the following error code is generated:

PHP date() relying on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier.

[Peter Hebert (peterhebert)]

this appears as a result of not setting a default time zone in php.ini
not a CodeIgniter bug per se...
if you set the timezone to UTC in php.ini it works fine in PHP 5.3 (which is the version in which this error appeared)

date.timezone = UTC