Comment # 10 on bug 1224053 from Michal Suchanek

fbiterm is not needed for supporting CJK locales in ncurses. ncurses are
perfectly capable of displaying CJK characters without fbiterm (under X11, over
a serial port, over a SSH connection).

yast does not need fbiterm. It can run perfectly fine without it. In fact it
has code to determine if fbiterm works and only runs it if it does not outright
crash.

Unfortunately, fbiterm can also fail silently, and then yast runs fbiterm
because it did not determine it's failing, and user is provided with a very
nice blank or frozen screen.