Improve current timezone initialization, default to UTC

This is what I hope will be a better fix for issue http://www.mantisbt.org/bugs/view.php?id=17747 (compare with @vboctor's original fix in PR #380).

In addition to fixing the original problem (i.e. PHP warnings when `date.timezone` is not set on PHP >= 5.4), this PR includes the following changes and improvements:
- move timezone setting code to a new API function
- Timezone selection list does not include 'UTC'  (http://www.mantisbt.org/bugs/view.php?id=17751)
- remove RHEL/CentOS-specific check (no longer needed as it only applies to PHP 5.1 and we require 5.3)
- fix detection of admin check scripts and improve the check itself
- revised documentation
Add a comment explaining why it is important to use UTC here.  It makes sense, but it would be useful to highlight if there is something that makes it necessary.