I believe that this issue is just an artifact of Eclipse starting before JBoss completes it's startup sequence. I've realized there's a seconds to minutes gap between the end of "ant start.demo" and when JBoss finishes the startup.
To check whether JBoss finised startup I ran:
tail -f jboss-as-7.1.1.Final/standalone/log/server.log
You will notice that lines keep getting appended to the log for quite a while after "ant stat.demo" finishes and Eclipse starts.
Futhermore, I ran:
$ netstat -c | grep 5153
to see when a service starts listening on 5153. Again, because of the delay in JBoss startup, it takes a while to see something like:
tcp6 0 0 localhost:53282 localhost:5153 ESTABLISHED
tcp6 0 0 localhost:5153 localhost:53282 ESTABLISHED
Once you see that the log doesn't have lines appended to it, and you see a service listening on 5153, you should be able to run the 10-Minute Tutorial: Using the Eclipse Tooling
My setup is jBPM 5.4.1 on Ubuntu Desktop 12.04, with Oracle Java 7, Apache-Ant 1.8.4. I followed the steps listed in Chapter 3. Installer. The only modification required to build.xml was changing the url pointing to Eclipse from:
"http://download.eclipse.org/technology/epp/downloads/release/helios/SR2/eclipse-java-helios-SR2-${download.type}.${download.extension}"
to
"http://archive.eclipse.org/technology/epp/downloads/release/helios/SR2/eclipse-java-helios-SR2-${download.type}.${download.extension}"
I hope this helps.