Basic operations For linux or Ubuntu

any_command --help |more

Display a brief help on a command (works with most commands). "--help" works similar to DOS "/h" switch. The "more" pipe is needed if the output is longer than one screen.

man topic

Display the contents of the system manual pages (help) on the topic. Try man man first. Press "q" to quit the viewer. The command info topic works similar and may contain more up-to-date information. Manual pages can be hard to read. Try any_command --help for short, easy to digest help on a command. If more info needed, have a look to the directory /usr/doc. To display manual page from a specific section, I may use something like in this example: man 3 exit (this displays an info on the command exit from section 3 of the manual pages).

apropos topic

Give me the list of the commands that have something to to do with my topic.

help command

Display brief info on a bash (shell) build-in command.

ls

List the content of the current directory. Under Linux, the command "dir" is an alias to ls. Many users have "ls" to be an alias to "ls --color".

ls -al |more

List the content of the current directory, all files (also those starting with a dot), and in a long form. Pipe the output through the "more" command, so that the display pauses after each screenful.

cd directory

Change directory. Using "cd" without the directory name will take you to your home directory. "cd -" will take you to your previous directory and is a convenient way to toggle between two directories. "cd .." will take you one directory up.

cp source destination

Copy files. E.g., cp /home/stan/existing_file_name . will copy a file to my current working directory. Use the "-r" option (for recursive) to copy the contents of whole directories, e.g. , cp -r my_existing/dir/ ~ will copy a subdirectory under my current working directory to my home directory.

mcopy source destination

Copy a file from/to a DOS filesystem (no mounting necessary). E.g., mcopy a:\autoexec.bat ~/junk . See man mtools for related commands: mdir, mcd, mren, mmove, mdel, mmd, mrd, mformat ....

mv source destination

Move or rename files. The same command is used for moving and renaming files and directories.

ln source destination

Create a hard link called destination to the file called source. The link appears as a copy of the original files, but in reality only one copy of the file is kept, just two (or more) directory entries point to it. Any changes the file are automatically visible throughout. When one directory entry is removed, the other(s) stay(s) intact. The limitation of the hard links are: the files have to be on the same filesystem, hard links to directories or special files are impossible.

ln -s source destination

Create a symbolic (soft) link called "destination" to the file called "source". The symbolic link just specifies a path where to look for the file. In contradistinction to hard links, the source and destination don't not have to tbe on the same filesystem. In comparison to hard links, the drawback of symbolic links are: if the original file is removed, the link is "broken", symbolic links can also create circular references (like circular references in spreadsheets or databases, e.g., "a" points to "b" and "b" points back to "a").

rm files

Remove (delete) files. You must own the file in order to be able to remove it. On many systems, you will be asked or confirmation of deleation, if you don't want this, use the "-f" (=force) option, e.g., rm -f * will remove all files in my current working directory, no questions asked.

mkdir directory

Make a new directory.

rmdir directory

Remove an empty directory.

rm -r files

(recursive remove) Remove files, directories, and their subdirectories. Careful with this command as root--you can easily remove all files on the system with such a command executed on the top of your directory tree, and there is no undelete in Linux (yet). But if you really wanted to do it (reconsider), here is how (as root): rm -rf /*

cat filename | more

View the content of a text file called "filename", one page a time. The "|" is the "pipe" symbol (on many American keyboards it shares the key with "\") The pipe makes the output stop after each screenful. For long files, it is sometimes convenient to use the commands head and tail that display just the beginning and the end of the file. If you happened to use "cat" a binary file and your terminal displays funny characters afterwards, you can restore it with the command "reset".

less filename

Scroll through a content of a text file. Press q when done. "Less" is roughly equivalent to "more" , the command you know from DOS, although very often "less" is more convenient than "more".

pico filename

Edit a text file using the simple and standard text editor called pico.

pico -w filename

Edit a text file, while disabling the long line wrap. Handy for editing configuration files, e.g. /etc/fstab.

find / -name "filename"

Find the file called "filename" on your filesystem starting the search from the root directory "/". The "filename" may contain wildcards (*,?).

locate filename

Find the file name of which contains the string "filename". Easier and faster than the previous command but depends on a database that normally rebuilds at night.

./program_name

Run an executable in the current directory, which is not on your PATH.

touch filename

Change the date/time stamp of the file filename to the current time. Create an empty file if the file does not exist.

xinit

Start a barebone X-windows server (without a windows manager).

startx

Start an X-windows server and the default windows manager. Works like typing "win" under DOS with Win3.1

startx -- :1

Start another X-windows session on the display 1 (the default is opened on display 0). You can have several GUI terminals running concurrently. Switch between them using <Ctrl><Alt><F7>, <Ctrl><Alt><F8>, etc.

xterm

(in X terminal) Run a simple X-windows terminal. Typing exit will close it. There are other, more advanced "virtual" terminals for X-windows. I like the popular ones: konsole and kvt (both come with kde) and gnome-terminal (comes with gnome). If you need something really fancy-looking, try Eterm.

xboing

(in X terminal). Very nice, old-fashioned game. Many small games/programs are probably installed on your system. I also like xboard (chess).

shutdown -h now

(as root) Shut down the system to a halt. Mostly used for a remote shutdown. Use <Ctrl><Alt><Del> for a shutdown at the console (which can be done by any user).

halt

reboot

(as root, two commands) Halt or reboot the machine. Used for remote shutdown, simpler to type than the previous command.

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pwd

Print working directory, i.e., display the name of my current directory on the screen.

hostname

Print the name of the local host (the machine on which you are working). Use netconf (as root) to change the name of the machine.

whoami

Print my login name.

id username

Print user id (uid) and his/her group id (gid), effective id (if different than the real id) and the supplementary groups.

date

Print or change the operating system date and time. E.g., I could change the date and time to 2000-12-31 23:57 using this command:

date 123123572000

To set the hardware (BIOS) clock from the system (Linux) clock, use the command (as root) setclock

time

Determine the amount of time that it takes for a process to complete + other info. Don't confuse it with the date command. E.g. I can find out how long it takes to display a directory content using:

time ls

who

Determine the users logged on the machine.

rwho -a

(=remote who) Determine all users logged on your network. The rwho service must be enabled for this command to run. If it isn't, run setup as root to enable "rwho".

finger user_name

System info about a user. Try: finger root

last

Show listing of users last logged-in on your system.

history | more

Show the last (1000 or so) commands executed from the command line on the current account. The "| more" causes the display to stop after each screenful.

uptime

Show the amount of time since the last reboot.

ps

(=print status) List the processes currently run by the current user.

ps axu | more

List all the processes currently running, even those without the controlling terminal, together with the name of the user that owns each process.

top

Keep listing the currently running processes, sorted by cpu usage (top users first). In KDE, you can get GUI-based Ktop from "K"menu under "System"-"Task Manager" (or by executing "ktop" in an X-terminal).

uname -a

(= Unix name with option "all") Info on your (local) server. I can also use guname (in X-window terminal) to display the info more nicely.

free

Memory info (in kilobytes).

df -h

(=disk free) Print disk info about all the filesystems (in human-readable form)

du / -bh | more

(=disk usage) Print detailed disk usage for each subdirectory starting at the "/" (root) directory (in human legible form).

cat /proc/cpuinfo

Cpu info--it show the content of the file cpuinfo. Note that the files in the /proc directory are not real files--they are hooks to look at information available to the kernel.

cat /proc/interrupts

List the interrupts in use.

cat /proc/version

Linux version and other info

cat /proc/filesystems

Show the types of filesystems currently in use.

cat /etc/printcap

Show the setup of printers.

lsmod

(As root. Use /sbin/lsmod to execute this command when you are a non-root user.) Show the kernel modules currently loaded.

set|more

Show the current user environment.

echo $PATH

Show the content of the environment variable "PATH". This command can be used to show other environment variables as well. Use "set" to see the full environment.

dmesg | less

Print kernel messages (the content of the so-called kernel ring buffer). Press "q" to quit "less". Use less /var/log/dmesg to see what "dmesg" dumped into this file right after the last system bootup.

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<Ctrl><Alt><F1>

Switch to the first text terminal. Under Linux you can have several (6 in standard setup) terminals opened at the same time.

<Ctrl><Alt><Fn> (n=1..6)

Switch to the nth text terminal.

tty

Print the name of the terminal in which you are typing this command.

<Ctrl><Alt><F7>

Switch to the first GUI terminal (if X-windows is running on this terminal).

<Ctrl><Alt><Fn> (n=7..12)

Switch to the nth GUI terminal (if a GUI terminal is running on screen n-1). On default, nothing is running on terminals

8 to 12, but you can run another server there.

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Transmission is a simple yet powerful torrent client. It’s available in some of the Linux distributions by default. However, one very important torrent client must have feature is missing in transmission. Now, we are going to add that feature by ourselves with our own shell script. We will make that shell script execute in Transmission after download completes. Let’s first get started by writing a single line shell script for shutdown. Most of you reading this may have used command to restart and shutdown your system. If you don’t know this, yes you can shutdown and restart Linux system from your terminal.

Go to home directory, fire up your text editor, create a file and write a script. I will use vim. Name the file shutdown.sh and add the following code into that file:

sudo -h shutdown now

Make the file executable:

chmod +x shutdown.sh

That’s all we would include in the script file.
Now, we will need gksu. If it’s not available in your system by default install it. It’s available in the repo of most Linux distributions. For Debian users:

sudo apt-get install gksu

Drag your Transmission icon in Desktop, right click and under basic heading you will find a command field. Add “gksu command” in that field. Gksu command makes transmission executable as a super user.

Or you can start transmission as a root from the terminal.

sudo transmission

Now, go to Edit> Preferences and under Downloading check on “Call Script when torrent is completed”. Give the path of the script file and that’s it.
However, there’s one hassle in this process. If you are downloading more than one torrent at once, your system will shutdown after completing one download. If you have a way to remove this hassle, share with us as a comment.

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It’s very easy to format pendrive or any other external hard drives in Linux. The formatting of the drive will erase all the files and directories in your drive which cannot be recovered. So, be careful while formatting the drive. You can use either command line or the graphical way to format the drive. Once, you plug in external drives in the computer, that will map to /dev/sda or /dev/sdb1 etc. The names can vary. We will identify external drive with the name. Follow these simple steps to quickly format the USB drive or pendrive or external drive in Linux:

Format using Terminal:

1. Identifying drive:

Insert the external drive and type the following command in the terminal:

dmesg | tail

The word “sdb” between the big brackets is the name of your external device that you just inserted. And the sdb1 is the partition name or generally it is the actual name that we are going to use while formatting the drive.

2. Unmount the drive:

After we identified our drive, another step is to unmount the external drive. Use the following command:

sudo umount /dev/sdb1

3. Format the drive:

The drive can be formatted into two formats: EXT3 and FAT32. The EXT3 format only works in Linux machines whereas FAT32 format works in Linux, MAC and PCs.

Format in FAT32 file system:
Use the following command:

sudo mkdosfs -n 'New' -I /dev/sdb1

Format in EXT3 file system:
Use the following command:

sudo mkfs.ext3 -n 'New' -I /dev/sdb1

Wheres, -n ‘New’ gives the name ‘New’ to the formatted drive and -I force the format to work properly. However, they both are not mandatory.

Format using GUI:

If command line scares, you there’s a tool called Gnome format that lets you to format external drives easily. Install gnome format using the following command:
In Ubuntu/Mint:

sudo apt-get install gnome-disk-utility

In Fedora/Cent OS/Red Hat:
Most probably, Gnome Disk Utility is already available in Fedora, Cent OS or Red Hat machines.
If it’s not, type the following command to install.

sudo yum install gnome-disk-utility

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You can actually create a HTML document using the shell script. If you are tired to see the output of your command in the terminal, you can redirect your output to the HTML document. This will allow you to see the output in the web browser like the website. I will assume, you know the basics of HTML. Even if you don’t, it’s very easy to learn. Find some good tutorials and get started.Now, let’s get started by writing a simple shell script with HTML tags in it.

#!/bin/sh
echo "<htmL>"
echo "<head>"
echo "<title>"
echo "Output in a HTML Document"
echo "</title>"
echo "</head>"
echo "<body>"
cat freshtutorial
echo "</body>"
echo "</html>"

This simple shell script called “test” will display the file called freshtutorial which I have already created in my home directory. Every HTML tags have to be quoted with echo. Redirect the script to HTML document.

sh test >> test.html

Open the test.html and see the output. Instead of creating a output into the terminal itself, it redirects the output to a webpage.

We don’t want to put echo in every HTML tags. This will make our job tedious and dirty. Thus to simplify this we will use “<< “.

#!/bin/bash
display="HELLO WORLD"
cat << noEcho
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE> Cool Bash trick </TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
$display
</BODY>
</HTML>
noEcho

“noEcho” is called token in the above script named “display”. You can assign any token as you want besides the bash keywords. Redirect the script into a webpage issuing the following command:

sh display >> display.html

This all might seem confusion at the beginning. Once you get used to it, it feels amazing. It is a nice cool shell programming trick as well. If you have any confusion, feel free to ask questions as comment.

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Notepad++ v6.3.1 new features:

Fix replacing ‘\n’ bug in both extended and regex mode.
Remember folding states for each file in session.
Fix a crash bug on uncommenting.
Add “Set Updater proxy…” command for setting the proxy of updater.
Fix the problem of Window position not saved/restored properly.
Add new API NPPM_GETCURRENTVIEW.

Download by your need from below :

Notepad Plus Plus

Notepad++ Installer : Take this one if you have no idea which one you should take.
Notepad++ zip package : Don’t want to use installer? Check this one (zip format).
Notepad++ 7z package : Don’t want to use installer? 7z format.
Notepad++ minimalist package : No theme, no plugin, no updater, quick download and play directly. 7z format.
SHA-1 digests for binary packages : Check it if you’re paranoid.
Notepad++ source code : The source code of current version.

Know me below in comment if anything goes wrong or, link doesn’t work

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Installing Adobe Photoshop on Ubuntu Linux is pretty easy. In this tutorial I will show you how to install Photoshop using Wine.Wine is a translation layer capable of running Windows applications on Linux operating system. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop.
Steps To Install Photoshop in Linux
1. First install Wine in Linux.
2. Then right click on Adobe Photoshop Setup.exe and click Open with Wine Windows program loader.
3. The installation Process will start automatically.
4. That’s it you have successfully installed Adobe Photoshop in Linux.
5. Goto Applications –> Wine –> Programs –> Adobe Photoshop
Thanx everybody.

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The initial stages of the war

Initial strategies

The Schlieffen Plan

Years before 1914, successive chiefs of the German general staff had been foreseeing Germany's having to fight a war on two fronts at the same time, against Russia in the east and France in the west, whose combined strength was numerically superior to the Central Powers'. The elder Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the German general staff from 1858 to 1888, decided that Germany should stay at first on the defensive in the west and deal a crippling blow to Russia's advanced forces before turning to counterattack the French advance. His immediate successor, Alfred von Waldersee, also believed in staying on the defensive in the west. Alfred, Graf von Schlieffen, who served as chief of the German general staff from 1891 to 1905, took a contrary view, and it was the plan he developed that was to guide Germany's initial wartime strategy. Schlieffen realized that on the outbreak of war Russia would need six full weeks to mobilize and assemble its vast armies, given the immense Russian countryside and population, the sparsity of the rail network, and the inefficiency of the government bureaucracy. Taking advantage of this fact, Schlieffen planned to initially adopt a purely defensive posture on the Eastern Front with a minimal number of troops facing Russia's slowly gathering armies. Germany would instead concentrate almost all of its troops in the west against France and would seek to bypass France's frontier fortifications by an offensive through neutral Belgium to the north. This offensive would sweep westward and then southward through the heart of northern France, capturing the capital and knocking that country out of the war within a few weeks. Having gained security in the west, Germany would then shift its troops to the east and destroy the Russian menace with a similar concentration of forces.
By the time of his retirement in 1905, Schlieffen had elaborated a plan for a great wheeling movement of the right (northern) wing of the German armies not only through central Belgium but also, in order to bypass the Belgian fortresses of Liège and Namur in the Meuse Valley, through the southernmost part of the Netherlands. With their right wing entering France near Lille, the Germans would continue to wheel westward until they were near the English Channel; they would then turn southward so as to sever the French armies' line of retreat from France's eastern frontier to the south; and the outermost arc of the wheel would sweep southward west of Paris, in order to avoid exposing the German right flank to a counterstroke launched from the city's outskirts. If the Schlieffen Plan succeeded, Germany's armies would simultaneously encircle the French Army from the north, overrun all of northeastern France, and capture Paris, thus forcing France into a humiliating surrender. The large wheeling movement that the plan envisaged required correspondingly large forces for its execution, in view of the need to keep up the numerical strength of the long-stretched marching line and the need to leave adequate detachments on guard over the Belgian fortresses that had been bypassed. Accordingly, Schlieffen allocated nearly seven-eighths of Germany's available troop strength to the execution of the wheeling movement by the right and centre wings, leaving only one-eighth to face a possible French offensive on Germany's western frontier. Thus, the maximum of strength was allocated to the wheel's edge—that is, to the right. Schlieffen's plan was observed by the younger Helmuth von Moltke, who became chief of the general staff in 1906. Moltke was still in office when war broke out in 1914.

Eastern Front strategy, 1914

Russian Poland, the westernmost part of the Russian Empire, was a thick tongue of land enclosed to the north by East Prussia, to the west by German Poland (Poznania) and by Silesia, and to the south by Austrian Poland (Galicia). It was thus obviously exposed to a two-pronged invasion by the Central Powers; but the Germans, apart from their grand strategy of crushing France before attempting anything against Russia, took note of the poverty of Russian Poland's transportation network and so were disinclined to overrun that vulnerable area prematurely. Austria-Hungary, however, whose frontier with Russia lay much farther east than Germany's and who was moreover afraid of disaffection among the Slav minorities, urged some immediate action to forestall a Russian offensive. Moltke therefore agreed to the Austrian general staff's suggestion for a northeastward thrust by the Austrian Army into Russian Poland—the more readily because it would occupy the Russians during the crisis in France.
The Russians, for their part, would have preferred to concentrate their immediately available forces against Austria and to leave Germany undisturbed until their mobilization should have been completed. The French were anxious to relieve the German pressure against themselves, however, and so they persuaded the Russians to undertake an offensive involving two armies against the Germans in East Prussia simultaneously with one involving four armies against the Austrians in Galicia. The Russian Army, whose proverbial slowness and unwieldy organization dictated a cautious strategy, thus undertook an extra offensive against East Prussia that only an army of high mobility and tight organization could have hoped to execute successfully.

The strategy of the Western Allies, 1914

For some 30 years after 1870, considering the likelihood of another German war, the French high command had subscribed to the strategy of an initial defensive to be followed by a counterstroke against the expected invasion: a great system of fortresses was created on the frontier, but gaps were left in order to “canalize” the German attack. France's alliance with Russia and its entente with Great Britain, however, encouraged a reversal of plan, and after the turn of the century a new school of military thinkers began to argue for an offensive strategy. The advocates of the offensive à l'outrance (“to the utmost”) gained control of the French military machine, and in 1911 a spokesman of this school, General J.-J.-C. Joffre, was designated chief of the general staff. He sponsored the notorious Plan XVII, with which France went to war in 1914.
Plan XVII gravely underestimated the strength that the Germans would deploy against France. Accepting the possibility that the Germans might employ their reserve troops along with regular troops at the outset, Plan XVII estimated the strength of the German Army in the west at a possible maximum of 68 infantry divisions. The Germans actually deployed the equivalent of 83 ^¹/_₂ divisions, counting Landwehr (reserve troops) and Ersatz (low-grade substitute troops) divisions. But French military opinion ignored or doubted this possibility; and during the war's crucial opening days, when the rival armies were concentrating and moving forward, the French Intelligence counted only Germany's regular divisions in its estimates of the enemy strength. This was a serious miscalculation. Plan XVII also miscalculated the direction and scope of the coming onslaught: though it foresaw an invasion through Belgium, it assumed that the Germans would take the route through the Ardennes, thereby exposing their communications to attack. Basing itself on the idea of an immediate and general offensive, Plan XVII called for a French thrust toward the Saar into Lorraine by the 1st and 2nd armies, while on the French left (the north) the 3rd and 5th armies, facing Metz and the Ardennes, respectively, stood ready either to launch an offensive between Metz and Thionville or to strike from the north at the flank of any German drive through the Ardennes. When war broke out, it was taken for granted that the small British Expeditionary Force (BEF) under Sir John French should be used as an adjunct to France's forces, more or less as the French might see fit. It is clearly evident that the French were oblivious to the gigantic German offensive that was being aimed at their left (northern) wing.

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Introduction

An international conflict that in 1914–18 embroiled most of the nations of Europe along with Russia, the United States, the Middle East, and other regions. The war pitted the Central Powers—mainly Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey—against the Allies—mainly France, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan, and, from 1917, the United States. It ended with the defeat of the Central Powers. The war was virtually unprecedented in the slaughter, carnage, and destruction it caused.
World War I was one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geopolitical history. It led to the fall of four great imperial dynasties (in Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey), resulted in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and, in its destabilization of European society, laid the groundwork for World War II.

The outbreak of war

With Serbia already much aggrandized by the two Balkan Wars (1912–13, 1913), Serbian nationalists turned their attention back to the idea of “liberating” the South Slavs of Austria-Hungary. Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, head of Serbia's military intelligence, was also, under the alias “Apis,” head of the secret society Union or Death, pledged to the pursuit of this pan-Serbian ambition. Believing that the Serbs' cause would be served by the death of the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austrian emperor Francis Joseph, and learning that the Archduke was about to visit Bosnia on a tour of military inspection, Apis plotted his assassination. Nikola Pašić, the Serbian prime minister and an enemy of Apis, heard of the plot and warned the Austrian government of it, but his message was too cautiously worded to be understood.

Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, riding in an open carriage at Sarajevo …

At 11:15 AM, on June 28, 1914, in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, Francis Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie, duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip.The chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff, Franz, Graf Conrad von Hötzendorf, and the foreign minister, Leopold, Graf von Berchtold, saw the crime as the occasion for measures to humiliate Serbia and so to enhance Austria-Hungary's prestige in the Balkans; and Conrad had already (October 1913) been assured by William II of Germany's support if Austria-Hungary should start a preventive war against Serbia. This assurance was confirmed in the week following the assassination, before William, on July 6, set off upon his annual cruise to the North Cape, off Norway.
The Austrians decided to present an unacceptable ultimatum to Serbia and then to declare war, relying on Germany to deter Russia from intervention. Though the terms of the ultimatum were finally approved on July 19, its delivery was postponed to the evening of July 23, since by that time the French president, Raymond Poincaré, and his premier, René Viviani, who had set off on a state visit to Russia on July 15, would be on their way home and therefore unable to concert an immediate reaction with their Russian allies. When the delivery was announced, on July 24, Russia declared that Austria-Hungary must not be allowed to crush Serbia.
Serbia replied to the ultimatum on July 25, accepting most of its demands but protesting against two of them, namely, that Serbian officials (unnamed) should be dismissed at Austria-Hungary's behest and that Austro-Hungarian officials should take part, on Serbian soil, in proceedings against organizations hostile to Austria-Hungary. Though Serbia offered to submit the issue to international arbitration, Austria-Hungary promptly severed diplomatic relations and ordered partial mobilization.
Home from his cruise on July 27, William learned on July 28 how Serbia had replied to the ultimatum. At once he instructed the German Foreign Office to tell Austria-Hungary that there was no longer any justification for war and that it should content itself with a temporary occupation of Belgrade. But, meanwhile, the German Foreign Office had been giving such encouragement to Berchtold that already on July 27 he had persuaded Francis Joseph to authorize war against Serbia. War was, in fact, declared on July 28, and Austro-Hungarian artillery began to bombard Belgrade the next day. Russia then ordered partial mobilization against Austria-Hungary; and on July 30, when Austria-Hungary was riposting conventionally with an order of mobilization on its Russian frontier, Russia ordered general mobilization. Germany, which since July 28 had still been hoping, in disregard of earlier warning hints from Great Britain, that Austria-Hungary's war against Serbia could be “localized” to the Balkans, was now disillusioned insofar as eastern Europe was concerned. On July 31 Germany sent a 24-hour ultimatum requiring Russia to halt its mobilization and an 18-hour ultimatum requiring France to promise neutrality in the event of war between Russia and Germany.
Both Russia and France predictably ignored these demands. On August 1, Germany ordered general mobilization and declared war against Russia, and France likewise ordered general mobilization. The next day, Germany sent troops into Luxembourg and demanded from Belgium free passage for German troops across its neutral territory. On August 3 Germany declared war against France.
In the night of August 3–4 German forces invaded Belgium. Thereupon, Great Britain, which had no concern with Serbia and no express obligation to fight either for Russia or for France but was expressly committed to defend Belgium, on August 4 declared war against Germany.
Austria-Hungary declared war against Russia on August 5; Serbia against Germany on August 6; Montenegro against Austria-Hungary on August 7 and against Germany on August 12; France and Great Britain against Austria-Hungary on August 10 and on August 12, respectively; Japan against Germany on August 23; Austria-Hungary against Japan on August 25 and against Belgium on August 28.
Romania had renewed its secret anti-Russian alliance of 1883 with the Central Powers on Feb. 26, 1914, but now chose to remain neutral. Italy had confirmed the Triple Alliance on Dec. 7, 1912, but could now propound formal arguments for disregarding it: first, Italy was not obliged to support its allies in a war of aggression; second, the original treaty of 1882 had stated expressly that the alliance was not against England.
On Sept. 5, 1914, Russia, France, and Great Britain concluded the Treaty of London, each promising not to make a separate peace with the Central Powers. Thenceforth, they could be called the Allied, or Entente, Powers, or simply the Allies.
The outbreak of war in August 1914 was generally greeted with confidence and jubilation by the peoples of Europe, among whom it inspired a wave of patriotic feeling and celebration. Few people imagined how long or how disastrous a war between the great nations of Europe could be, and most believed that their country's side would be victorious within a matter of months. The war was welcomed either patriotically, as a defensive one imposed by national necessity, or idealistically, as one for upholding right against might, the sanctity of treaties, and international morality.

Technology of war in 1914

The planning and conduct of war in 1914 were crucially influenced by the invention of new weapons and the improvement of existing types since the Franco-German War of 1870–71. The chief developments of the intervening period had been the machine gun and the rapid-fire field artillery gun. The modern machine gun, which had been developed in the 1880s and '90s, was a reliable belt-fed gun capable of sustained rates of extremely rapid fire; it could fire 600 bullets per minute with a range of more than 1,000 yards (900 metres). In the realm of field artillery, the period leading up to the war saw the introduction of improved breech-loading mechanisms and brakes. Without a brake or recoil mechanism, a gun lurched out of position during firing and had to be re-aimed after each round. The new improvements were epitomized in the French 75-millimetre field gun; it remained motionless during firing, and it was not necessary to readjust the aim in order to bring sustained fire on a target. Machine guns and rapid-firing artillery, when used in combination with trenches and barbed-wire emplacements, gave a decided advantage to the defense, since these weapons' rapid and sustained firepower could decimate a frontal assault by either infantry or cavalry.

There was a considerable disparity in 1914 between the deadly effectiveness of modern armaments and the doctrinal teachings of some armies. The South African War and the Russo-Japanese War had revealed the futility of frontal infantry or cavalry attacks on prepared positions when unaccompanied by surprise, but few military leaders foresaw that the machine gun and the rapid-firing field gun would force armies into trenches in order to survive. Instead, war was looked upon by many leaders in 1914 as a contest of national wills, spirit, and courage. A prime example of this attitude was the French Army, which was dominated by the doctrine of the offensive. French military doctrine called for headlong bayonet charges of French infantrymen against the German rifles, machine guns, and artillery. German military thinking, under the influence of Alfred, Graf von Schlieffen, sought, unlike the French, to avoid frontal assaults but rather to achieve an early decision by deep flanking attacks; and at the same time to make use of reserve divisions alongside regular formations from the outset of war. The Germans paid greater attention to training their officers in defensive tactics using machine guns, barbed wire, and fortifications.