Comment 11 for bug 83604

Basically, the problem is that with the default configuration ntpdate only works if the ntp package is also installed (thus providing /etc/ntp.conf), but while ntpdate is installed by default (ubuntu-minimal depends on it), the ntp package is not (because nothing depends on it, and it shouldn't really be needed by default either).

Thus, one of the following should probably be done:
1. Change the configuration to use the settings in /etc/default/ntpdate instead (by setting NTPDATE_USE_NTP_CONF=no in said file as mentioned by Pedro Alejandro López-Valencia)
2. Change ntpdate so that it falls back to using the settings in /etc/default/ntpdate if the ntp configuration in /etc/ntp.conf is empty or fails to provide anything useful
3. Also install ntp by default, or have ntpdate at least suggest it (should really be depends, since currently ntpdate won't work without ntp)

Option 2 seems to the most reasonable to me in the long run, but option 1 would be a defensible quick solution (assuming that we want all requests from ntpdate to go to ntp.ubuntu.com by default since that's what it would use).

Yes, this also breaks time-admin in Gnome, but the actual bug is still in the ntpdate configuration requiring a config file that may not exit.