openSUSE 13.2: When YaST does not open anymore

Out of the blue I had been confronted with non opening YaST modules in my openSUSE install. Neither did opening up yast with the console/ncurses interface work, no, not even yast2 sw_single. No output on console at all. The only thing that did work is yast2 or rather yast2 --qt in overview mode.

Launching any of the YaST modules didn’t work and no errors where printed anywhere. And I didn’t yet know about the y2log, yet. After some googling I found some reports hinting at fast_gettext.

So the solution is, force a reinstall of that gem:

zypper in -f rubygem-fast_gettext

No idea how this happened. I’ve been playing around with ruby, gem and rvm lately, but can’t imagine how that could have broken that specific gem.