Jostein Gogstad, can you give this another shot? Get the new 4.3.0-SNAPSHOT. I also rebased https://github.com/brmeyer/aries/tree/jpa21 to pull in their latest work. Pull that down and try running the following, before we mess with binaries:

mvn clean install -DskipTests=true -U

Run that in the root of the project, not in /jpa. Make sure you're using JDK6 – 7 is not supported.

https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/tree/master/documentation/src/main/docbook/quickstart/tutorials/osgi/managed-jpa was updated for the Aries upgrade.