Pi Zero W headless setup with Raspberry Pi Lite Bookworm

I have this setup: 1. Debian Linux laptop / Windows 11 PC 2. Raspberry Pi Zero W 3. OTG cable I'm trying to set it up to work in headless mode (will run Docker on it with Pi-Hole, and probably some other minimal container that doesn't use many resources). I use RPi Imager from my Debian Linux laptop to burn the image to the SD card, by following the first 3 steps here (latest image of course, not what is there), and add an ssh file as well, on top of those instructions: https://www.ctrl-alt-del.cc/2020/01/mikrotik-pi-zero-pi-hole-advertising.html Step 4 for Debian Bookworm does not work. Using ssh pi@raspberrypi.local I get ssh: Could not resolve hostname raspberrypi.local: No such host is known. These steps do work for Bullseye, so a breaking change seems to have happened somewhere.

There was this post which is a simliar-ish story? https://discord.com/channels/818384379197784084/1162773080444239913/1162773080444239913

So, in RPi Imager I did all of the advanced options and no go, still the same issue.

What have you entered in the advanced options?

Basically tried everything <@808278006614196262> 1. Set hostname 2. Enable SSH 3. Set username and password 4. Configure wireless LAN 5. Set locale settings

I haven't tried all of the combinations, but I did try with all of these settings enabled and a couple other combinations.

None of these advanced options needed to be set with the older image, it worked without any.

There is only one thing I was able to find but I don't understand it: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/bookworm-the-new-version-of-raspberry-pi-os/#comment-1595016

I have 2 partitions: bootfs and rootfs. In bootfs (where I make my changes), there is a config.txt file. But I can't find a firmware folder there. That folder is in rootfs/boot/firmware and contains 0 files.

What have you entered for 1 and 3?

For 1, I left the defaults (so, raspberrypi.local).

For 3, my first name in lowercase letters as username, and like an 8-10 character password

I tried ssh raspberrypi.local, ssh firstname@raspberrypi.local and ssh pi@raspberrypi.local and none of those work.

Pinging doesn't work either.

Have you tried ssh firstname@raspberrypi or ssh fistname@IP?

Do you have avahi-daemon installed on the Debian machine?

<@808278006614196262> I haven't tried the former, no. Tried it now and no go sadly. For the latter, I don't have the IP.

I also installed avahi-utils

Would there be any logs I could check that could be useful, that are written to the SD card? I don't have a mini HDMI to HDMI cable currently so I'm ordering one, I can't check what is being displayed if anything is.

Maybe that comment from https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/bookworm-the-new-version-of-raspberry-pi-os/#comment-1595016 helps somehow but it seems weird that it disables otg_mode and I don't have those files in that firmware folder 😅

Since the older image works it's at least clear that something changed in between that breaks this... but what is the exact change that breaks this is the question, haha.

What would be the next thing to do here? 😅