I am trying to upgrade Linuxmint 19.3 to 20.3 on a Dell inspirion 17 5758 laptop with an Intel AC3160 wifi card. The wifi card is detecting all available wireless connections on my network and beyond, but when i try to login to any of the SSIDs I get a msg back saying I need to authenicate onto the network. I've logged into Linuxmint 20.3 with this bootable USB on another laptop and have no troubles getting a wireless connection. I don't know if it's the wifi card or a drive issue. I can't seem to find any documentation that covers a problem like this.

desertsquidLQ,

Why are you not upgrading to the latest Linux Mint 21.1 instead?
https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

It is generally advisable to do a fresh installation, after backing up all personal data, because an in situ upgrade can often go wrong.

Having a separate Home partition when doing a fresh installation is useful:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...-distro-37074/

Hi beachboy2,

Thanks for the response. I have had a rash of problems with wifi connections. Since all of the computers I was using until recently were built between 2008 and 2014, I thought it might be an issue with the wifi card. I'm working with 4 laptops here. None of these laptops have a problem seeing the available networks available. However on two of them I keep getting this 'authentication required' msg. They are being prevented from logging in.
What really has me perplexed is that I recently bought a new Dell laptop with ChromeOS. It's doing the same thing.
I have Hughesnet as an internet provided. It takes me about a week to use up my 50 gb bandwidth. At that point, I'm lucky to have 3 mbps for the rest of the month.
I am trying to find out if this is a hardware or configuration issue. I use the same passphrase on all the computers. Some give me the error msg, some just login just fine.

desertsquidLQ,

I have no knowledge of HughesNet except what I have seen from several users and it does not make pleasant reading.

https://bestcompany.com/isp/company/hughesnet

Since your problem is common to all of your laptops, it may be that HughesNet holds the solution somewhere?